Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > White Papers > Deploying Dell EMC SRDF/Metro Smart DR with Microsoft SQL Server for Physical and Virtual Environments > The problem with failover solutions
Customers expect uninterrupted online access to their applications 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, software and hardware do require maintenance and may fail from time to time. The cost of these downtimes can be extreme, affected by the criticality of the system and the length of the outage. Having a robust infrastructure that minimizes downtime is quite important. Failover to a remote site is part of that infrastructure solution. However, the problem with such a solution is the temporary user disruption and potential loss of work that takes place while the application is restarted on the target database. To avoid a failover, a clustered solution can be used in which multiple servers provide High Availability to the applications so that if any of them fail, the workload can continue on the surviving cluster nodes.