Multipurposing a failover server?

Question

I'm not a DBA so this may be a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway. We're upgrading our SQL Servers from 2000 to 2005 and we will probably use either database replication or database mirroring. Our DBA would like to "multipurpose" the standby server meaning that he'd like to increase our capabilities and capacity by running other database applications on the standby server since "it's just going to be sitting there anyway" (his words, not mine). Is this such a good idea? Right now, our main application server uses only one instance that contains 50+ databases. As I understand it, what we're doing now and what our DBA is proposing for a failover server is a bad idea because all of these databases are sharing memory, CPUs, and working areas. If one applications starts behaving badly, the other DBs could be affected.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

It's really a business question that needs to be answered?? is a slow app better then no app if you can't afford the expense of extra hardware?

Standby and mirrored db's can be used for reporting. Using it as the failover db can work if you have enough headroom (i.e. both databases will comfortably run on the server)