SQL Replication/Log Shipping Question

I'm specing out servers for our upcoming ERP conversion. We will have a SQL server as our database. We are wanting to have a secondary copy of our database, not for performance just to have our data on two seperate servers. I'm not sure how SQL replication would work or the best way to go about this. My question really involves if I have SQL in repliation mode, does it work the same way it does in production mode where SQL takes up most of the memory provided to the machine? I'm wanting the 2nd server to have a full copy of our SQL data and be a Backup Exec core server.