Good day everybody!  This time my question centres around Disaster Recovery.  I have done a bit of research and all that, but it's much easier to ask the gurus for their opinions.

Currently our 'DR' solution is full backups with hourly transaction log backups made.  Problem is, if one of our major systems crashes, it's going to take perhaps days to get it back online.  My manager wants a failover solution where we can say we lose at most an hour's worth of transactions while bringing the system back up (failing over) almost immediately.  The key focus for now is our JDE system and our payroll system.  What would you guys suggest we look at that would allow the least downtime and the best cost-effectiveness?

you can go with Log shipping or even Active-Passive clustering if you don't have budget problem. Basically its all depends on the amount of data loss you can easily manage without having any financial loss.

Just one thing I wanna ask as you said  "if one of our major systems crashes, it's going to take perhaps days to get it back online" is your database size that huge? as why would it will take days to bring it back online?

They're looking at SAN to SAN replication as well.  I was asked for a good SQL solution that would suit the company's needs.  The database is about half a terabyte in size.  Just copying the backup on our super fast (note sarcasm) network takes about 8 hours.  The restore itself takes another few hours.  Then we need to make sure the other databases that are needed for the system to run properly are also restored, etc.

What are the pros and cons related to log shipping?  They'll have a 2MB pipe dedicated to replication, but as far as I can make out this will be for any and all forms of replication, i.e. SAN and SQL.

 http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Replication/logshippingvsreplication/1399/

http://kylecordes.com/2006/05/17/log-ship-testing/

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/SQL-Server/microsoft.public.sqlserver.clustering/2006-10/msg00092.html

Hope this helps and wait for what others has to say.....

Thank you so much for your responses thus far.  I'm slowly but surely getting a better understanding.