Exchange cluster

Dont know clusters, just starting to look into them. I do, however, have
needs for fault tolarance. Starting with our email server. Sounds to me
that Clustering is a bit over kill for an Exchange server or 12gig database
to be useing as a fail over system. I'm i correct in making this
assumption?
Does anyone have any recomendations, other than Neverfail, or Double Take?
Thanks much!
Irv
http://home.pacbell.net/irvingf
No, it isn't overkill.
I have a database that is 750 MB and another one that is 2.4 GB that we
installed a cluster explicitly for those two databases. We also have a 3rd
server which we log ship those databases to as well as 2 other servers that
we replicate the data to. That's a total of 5 machines, 2 Windows 2003
Advanced Server licenses, 3 Windows 2003 Server licenses, 3 SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition licenses, and 2 SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition
licenses. All of that for ~3.15 GB of data.
It all depends upon how highly you value the data. This particular data had
a monetary value to that particular company of about $400 million with a
downtime cost of approximately $400K per minute, so in comparison the
technology we threw at the problem was pretty cheap considering the
alternative.
Mike
Principal Mentor
Solid Quality Learning
"More than just Training"
SQL Server MVP
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com
http://www.mssqlserver.com