Designing for Availability
Performance is not the only factor that the DBA must consider. The database should perform well—but, with a limited budget, performance must be balanced with availability. Availability means that the database and, therefore, the data is there when you need it. Performance means that you can get the data fast.
But what is more important, performance or availability? The answer is unique to each scenario. If you are given a limited budget and told that the database should be available 99.99 percent of the time between 8 A.M. and 6 P.M., you can't throw all your money into one really fast server. You will have to ensure availability through features like replication, database mirroring, log shipping, and failover clustering. ...
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