SQL high availability and balancing

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Hi,

I seem to understand the terminology of failover clustering as well as the
sibgle/mulple instance installations but it seems it does take about 2min for
a node to take over etc. I also red about log shipping and transactional
replication... Is there a way to load balance that can be done with SQL since
NLB was designed not for sql/exchange but for other netwrking services as ftp
etc?

Thanks
--
George
.