The 35-page whitepaper on high availability I wrote for the SQL team over the summer has been published on MSDN. It's a 2-300 level whitepaper that describes the various high-availability technologies in SQL Server 2008 and how they can be used to mitigate disasters. It's chock-full of links to other whitepapers, technical articles and Books Online sections and also presents my methodology for planning a high-availability strategy.

You can get it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee523927.aspx.

Enjoy!

Here's the table of contents:

• Introduction
• Causes of Downtime and Data Loss
  • Planned Downtime
  • Unplanned Downtime and Data Loss
• Planning a High-Availability Strategy
  • Requirements
  • Limitations
  • Technology Evaluation
• SQL Server 2008 High-Availability Technologies
  • Logging and Recovery
  • Backup, Restore, and Related Technologies
    • Partial Database Availability and Online Piecemeal Restore
    • Instant File Initialization
    • Mirrored Backups
    • Backup Checksums
    • Backup Compression
  • Other Single-Instance Technologies
    • Online Operations
    • Database Snapshots
    • Hot-Add Memory and CPU
    • Resource Governor
  • Multi-Instance Technologies
    • Log Shipping
    • Transactional Replication
    • Database Mirroring
    • Failover Clustering
    • Combining Multi-Instance Technologies
    • Virtualization
• Mitigating the Causes of Downtime and Data Loss
• High-Availability Features Supported by SQL Server 2008 Editions
• Conclusion