SQL 2016 Standard – Basic Availability Group

High Availability for SQL 2016 Standard edition now has the “Basic Availability Group”.

The Basic Availability Group is based on AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG) that was released in SQL 2012 Enterprise. AAG continues to be an Enterprise edition feature set.

Basic availability groups use a subset of features compared to advanced availability groups on SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. Basic availability groups include the following limitations:

  • Limit of two replicas (primary and secondary).
  • No read access on secondary replica.
  • No backups on secondary replica.
  • No support for replicas hosted on servers running a version of SQL Server prior to SQL Server 2016 Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3).
  • No support for adding or removing a replica to an existing basic availability group.
  • Support for one availability database.
  • Basic availability groups cannot be upgraded to advanced availability groups. The group must be dropped and re-added to a group that contains servers running only SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.
  • Basic availability groups are only supported for Standard Edition servers.

Basic Availability Group – info on MSDN

 

Microsoft Storage Services

Microsoft Storage Services – Overview training

Software Defined Storage

  • Hyper-Converged – Storage Spaces Direct
  • Converged – Storage Spaces

Traditional Storage

  • Block – Storage Spaces or 3rd party SAN
  • File – Scale Out File Services or NAS (SMB3)

Hybrid Cloud Storage

  • Hybrid – StorSimple

Cloud Storage

  • Cloud – Azure and Azure Stack Storage

Microsoft storage

Microsoft Virtual Academy – Free training

Deliver Scalable, Software-Defined Storage Anywhere

 

Office 365 – Microsoft doesn’t do backup

It is a shock to many customers to find out that Microsoft is not backing up their email in O365…

There are several third party utilities out there to backup Office 365.

EMC’s solution is called Spanning…

Spanning can backup Emails, Calendar appointments, and OneDrive.

http://spanning.com/products/office365-backup/

Regardless of what Microsoft says about this topic, I would always recommend backing up your data…