How can I improve availability of our production InterBase database server?
Despite its bad reputation, Windows – and in particular Windows XP – can be a solid server operating system if you are talking about a dedicated machine, locked in a server room. Such a machine would not be subject to random installations to try out “some new software”. However, any machine can fail – a hard disk can crash, you can have an electric outage and your USV may not work. Normally you would make daily backups (depending on frequency of updates in your situation) and in case of a hardware failure, restore from yesterday’s backup. Your downtime would be maybe an hour, including the time to get a second machine ready. A great way to increase availability is to create a shadow of the database. Shadows are exact duplicates of the database. The purpose of shadows is to protect you from hardware failure. First you have to set up one or more shadows on sepaate diskss or better still, a separate machine. Then, when your primary disk or primary server breaks down, the users can reconne
