JCo connection and SLD

Greetings, we have a federated portal which is using JCo connections as part of the MSS/ESS business package. We had a situation where the SLD was down therefore the JCo connections were down. Our question is JCo connection completely dependent on SLD. In other words if SLD is down, will that mean our JCo connection will fail thus an outage.

If this is the case what is the best way to make sure SLD is highly available? Our options are to make SLD highly available or distribute SLD on each system.

Also, what is the performance hit on making SLD distributed on all Portal system if this the route we go?

Thanks in advance!