The best protection against a variety of both planned and unplanned outages is the use of a standby configuration. The standby configuration should be in a different data center than your primary system, ideally far away from the primary system. A standby configuration provides protection against disasters such as flooding, earthquakes, and wide-spread power or network outages.

The simplest way to implement the standby configuration is to duplicate the primary system and use the same load routines to populate the standby system. Such an implementation minimizes the risk of data corruption caused by replication technologies, as well as the risk of an accident--for example, the DBA thought that he was connected to the test environment when emptying a table but was in fact connected to the production environment. If replication or mirroring were being used then such an accidental oversight would result in the data deletion being replicated/mirrored to the backup machine, which would negate the disaster recovery strategy.