SQL Server 2005 offers various techniques in providing highly available access to your data. Some of which are as follows:
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Failover Clustering
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Database Mirroring
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Data Replication
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Log Shipping
Among these high availability options, there's no such thing as a superior or inferior solution. It all depends on your environment, and your latency requirements.
On a high level discussion, failover clustering is a hardware solution wherein, if the server fails, the entire SQL instance moves to the passive node. This solution requires that you have hardware that are supported for clustering.
Mirroring, works on a database level which means that, unlike clustering wherein all database will move from one node to the other, you can configure failover on each database providing you with more flexibility.
Data replication on the other hand, allows us to transfer data from one location to the other without investing too much on your infrastructure. Failover clustering and mirroring can also offer this feature, but you would have to spend a lot of money to make it work. If you dont require syncronous replication, and latency is not much of an issue, then data replication might be an option for you.
Log shipping, is an automated backup restore. The advantages of this is you can restore the backup to several databases maybe located in several locations as well.
On this forum, we will discuss in detail each of these options, what are their requirements, and how do you go about implementing them.