We have considered other options. Eventually, we needed something standard off the shelf.

We looked at some third-party solutions, which are no longer of importance today. Some of them had better features at the time, but we decided to go with the MS solution to not be hooked in version upgrading problems.

As MSCS was improved with every new version of Windows Server, we never regretted that decision. Some of the RDBMS systems we deployed twenty years back are still running, albeit with new hardware and the latest software of course, but the entities remained the same.