Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Combining Failover with Scale-Out Options

SQL Server 2012 pushes combinations of options to achieve HA levels. Building up an AlwaysOn FCI configuration, with AlwaysOn Availability Groups with two or more replicas, launches you into distributed workload scalability and maximum HA. Another example would be combining data replication with database mirroring to provide maximum availability of data, scalability to users, and fault tolerance via failover, potentially at each node in the replication topology. By starting with the publisher and perhaps the distributor, you make them both database mirror failover configurations.

Building up a combination of both options together is essentially the best of both worlds: the super-low latency of database ...