WINDOWS SERVER INTERVIEW WHY UPGRADE?
What opportunities does Windows Server 2012 R2 present to resellers? Windows Server product marketing manager Patrik Bihammar offers six reasons to offer it…
that will benefit the most from moving to WS 2012 R2. To use an analogy, the performance improvements you get moving from WS 2003/2008 to WS 2012 R2 is like moving from driving an estate vehicle to a sports car.
What kind of reaction have you seen to Windows Server 2012 R2 so far? Which companies are already using it? WS 2012 was extremely well received when it was launched a year ago, and I am proud to say that WS 2012 R2 is seeing the same warm reception. A Network World article praised Microsoft for taking customer feedback into account and called several feature updates “stunning”, rating the release 4.3 out of five (between “Very Good” and “Exceptional”). Aston Martin and NTTX are just two of the companies that are using it.
What are you doing to market WS 2012 R2? In the UK we have embarked on a major launch wave since its official release in October 2013, including our participation at IP Expo and our executive launch. Regardless of this, we are always out talking to our customers about our Cloud OS vision and how our platform and latest solutions can help transform and expand our customers’ data centres, as well as moving away from managing individual servers and infrastructure in silos of servers, storage and networking to start thinking
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about the infrastructure as a unified fabric of compute and storage on which we run applications. We deliver these as a service to businesses regardless if deployed on-premises in our own data centres or in the cloud via Windows Azure or a third-party service provider. For example, we are
currently running 24 ‘Transform the Datacentre’
devices running Windows 8 and Windows RT. With My Server you can manage users, devices, files, documents and alerts, reset user passwords and access shared files on WS 2012/R2 Essentials. In addition, files recently accessed using My Server will continue to be available to you even when you’re offline.
“If you plan to virtualise and build a private cloud, WS 2012 R2 is the best and most cost- effective solution
on the market.” Patrik Bihammar, Microsoft UK
workshops across major cities in the UK, nine Cloud OS Relays and a number of ‘IT Pro’ camps to get out and talk to our customers about our Cloud OS vision, provide demos and let customers get hands on with WS 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure.
A free ‘My Server 2012 R2’ app has launched for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. What are the benefits of using the app? The My Server app is designed to help keep users seamlessly connected to their server resources on
In your opinion, what effect has the rise of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies and an increasing number of employees working from home had on the use of servers in the workplace? We have embraced the BYOD phenomena and are building technology to enable IT firms to empower their employees to work from anywhere and from any device with technology built into WS 2012 R2 – from Active Directory, Dynamic Access Control, Direct Access, Work Folders as well as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), to helping with management, security, remote access, protection and control of corporate information. We have made substantial
enhancements to the VDI capabilities built into WS 2012 R2, including user experience and storage de- duplication to significantly reduce VDI deployment costs. Furthermore, with System Center Configuration Manager, which is used to manage 66 per cent of enterprise desktop PCs, Endpoint Protection and Windows Intune, Microsoft offers an
1. End of support Windows Server (WS) 2003 will have support ended in July 2015, so organisations will have only 18 months to migrate their applications off – or risk running them on unpatched and unsupported server platforms. Helping customers with a smooth migration is a major opportunity for resellers, as is upgrading customers from WS 2008/R2.
2. Virtualisation The Hyper-V virtualisation platform in WS 2012 R2 provides industry-leading scalability and performance, heterogeneous platform support for Linux Guest OS, secure multitenancy through Hyper-V Extensible Switch, and complete virtual machine (VM) mobility through shared- nothing live migration and storage live migration.
3. Private Cloud WS 2012 R2, along with Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 system management products, offers the best private cloud platform. It includes capabilities like resource pooling, elasticity, automation, self-service and the ability to do showbacks and chargebacks.
integrated solution for organisations to manage and secure their PCs, tablets and smartphones, whether Windows, Apple or Android devices, through unified device management (UDM).
Home-based personal clouds and cheap media servers for streaming are becoming more popular. Will you return to the Home Server line of products, or release another OS dedicated to such services?
4. Storage
WS 2012 R2 introduces several storage enhancements. In WS 2012 we introduced Storage Spaces, which allows you to pool industry standard hard drives into storage pools and spaces. In R2, we introduced automatic tiering where, in addition to HDDs, you can add a layer of SSDs to further improve performance. Storage Spaces and file-based storage with SMB 3.0 delivers similar levels of reliability, availability, manageability and high performance at a fraction of the cost of a storage area network.
5. Disaster Recovery Systems can go down for many reasons, whether it’s a power outage, a break-in or a fire. WS 2012 R2 Hyper-V Replica offers a cost effective-way to improve business continuity and reduce the risk of data loss in the event of system failure by automatically replicating your virtual machine to another location over a common broadband connection.
6. Remote Workers WS 2012 R2’s VDI improvements include a centralised management console, RemoteFX for wide area network (WAN) and high- performance, low-cost file- based storage for VDI, as well as storage de-duplication to reduce the storage cost of a VDI implementation. Direct Access is also easier to deploy and comes with improved scalability and manageability.
Windows 8 provides much of the same functionality previously found only in Windows Home Server, including Storage Spaces, file/media sharing (HomeGroup) and Backup. Windows 8 offers a first class experience and an easy and familiar user interface for media, entertainment and file sharing, for example to stream music and video, file sharing, connectivity to SkyDrive and expansion across the home with Xbox.
FURTHER READING
‘Transform the Datacentre’ workshops:
http://aka.ms/tdi_workshops Cloud OS Relays:
www.cloudoscommunity.com/cloudosrelay A fix for the Storage Spaces issue on Windows Server 2012 R2 when used with Windows Azure:
http://bit.ly/INjUKC
www.pcr-online.biz
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