Microsoft SQL Server 2016 has a pretty decent feature set to achieve cost-effective high availability for your environment and build a reliable disaster recovery solution. Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) and Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) are included in SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition and serve to implement high redundancy level for business-critical databases. In this article, I would like to discuss some differences between these solutions and open the curtain on how it can be done with Software-Defined Storage like Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and VSAN from StarWind (StarWind VSAN).