Creating the appropriate High Availability (HA) environment to support business requirements can be a difficult task for any enterprise that has not dealt with the complexities of HA in the past. Planning for HA begins with business requirements. Only once those are defined and understood can the data center infrastructure needed to support those requirements be outlined. Components that must be considered in the planning include:
- Real business requirements for HA applications.
- Server clustering and failover.
- Redundant network infrastructure.
- Multi-homed wide area network connections.
By leveraging existing IT staff knowledge and data center capabilities, basic HA capabilities can be incorporated without breaking the bank. Understanding the steps and components of HA data center creation at a high level will make the process easier.