Disaster recovery in the broadest sense means your application (MOSS) at location A can go offline and automatically fail over to location B with no or minimal downtime. True Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity for a MOSS solution comes in 3 flavors: Inhouse, Inhouse and Service Provider (outsourced) or Service Provider (100% outsourced).

Inhouse MOSS DR is created by housing one MOSS web farm in one company owned data center (DC) and replicating data to a second company owned DC. This scenario provides the most control but is also the most expensive to maintain.

The 2nd option is to run the primary web farm at a Service provider’s (like Frontpages) data center and run the DR MOSS site at the company’s inhouse DC. This scenario can save companies up the 40% but is complex since 2 groups and networks must work in harmony to maintain the solution.

The third and most effective solution is a completely outsourced MOSS DR solution where a service provider like Frontpages hosts the primary MOSS web farm in one of their data centers and replicates data to their disaster recover data center. This geographically dispersed and hosted MOSS DR solution saves companies up to 60% and reduces complexity since the service provider maintains both sites and replication link(s).

High availability and disaster recovery solutions for MOSS 07 are much more affordable than in the past with the advent of virtualization technology — fewer physical servers are required and software “snapshots” can be moved around quickly and dynamically due to hardware failure or load issues.

Fault Tolerance

Software, Hardware, Network, and Datacenter fault tolerance - Usually a request for some solution that provides a redundant solution outside of the datacenter X miles away. Load balancing within the farm or Clustering on the SQL side are examples of this within the data center, and Database Mirroring is an example of this outside the datacenter.

The high availability technologies found in some fault tolerance and high availability solutions are listed here for quick reference:

• NLB - Windows (Network) Load Balancing - hardware, software, and disk failure on the Web Front Ends. Requires multiple servers.
• SQL Clustering - SQL Server 2000 or 2005 Clustering an instance of SQL with common shared disks such as with a SAN or hardware device for shared disks. Provides for hardware or software fault tolerance. Doesn't provide for disk subsystem failure. RAID on the disks can provide fault tolerance for disk failure. Requires multiple servers and shared disk system.
• Database Mirroring - SQL 2008 only, supports mirroring the databases for failover. You can mirror between 2 different datacenters. Bandwidth is a consideration.
• SQL Log Shipping - Read only and Read write failovers are possible and supported. Single or multiple instances clusters are fine. You backup/restore and setup a logship relationship. The database receiving the transaction logs is essentially offline until you break the relationship and bring it online either read-only or read/write. You then either failback in the read case, or logship back in the read/write case. (Note this does require managing the namespaces and complexities around the config database and server naming.)
• Content Publishing - Content Publishing in MOSS 2007 Standard and Enterprise Edition (Not in WSS) can provide for a read only copy of a WCM site such as a read-only publishing site. Although this truly is one way publishing, you could publish to two or more production farms on either side of the world and do either IP ranges per farm or round robin DNS and pull out the affected farm manually or with a heart beat (I wouldn't recommend NLB in this case). Hardware loadbalancing devices would as well load balance the farms until one was down.

Offline Replica Client Solutions part of Microsoft Office 2007.

• Groove 2007 - (Client Solution) Groove is one way of getting an offline replica of your workspaces including data in your client with the ability to resync with other peers while not on the corporate network.
• Outlook 2007 - Outlook has offline capability for lists with one way replication of connected lists to the client.

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