I'm administrating a fairly large website (currently about 300 thousand page views a day) which is expected to grow fast. Currently both IIS and SQL Server are running in a quad core server, with RAID 10 SAS Hard Drives and 32 GB of RAM. A less powerful server is configured as cold backup. Databases are synchronized daily and also the site files are moved over to the backup server daily. In case the primary server goes down, the site can be up again in a few hours, but that's not ideal. I'm looking for a solution that will offer:
- improved performance. In the future it will be necessary to create a web farm to handle the requests, so I need to plan for that.
- redundancy. If one server goes down, the site should not go down.
- backup. The data are critical, so the SQL Server configuration should be in such a way that we don't loose data older than 1 day (it's no big issue if the last day data are lost)
Also, the solution should include disaster recovery. If the data center goes in flame, we'll need a solution to be back online in less than one day (we're thinking of keeping a copy of the data and site in our local servers, but we'll need a way to have the process as automatic as possible. The primary server is hosted in a data center in Germany).
The database is 50GB+ while the web application is rather small.