Windows Server 2003 The Guest of Honor at Yet Another Farewell Party
IMAGES © NAKEDCM, KANATE / FOTOLIA
WRITTEN BY LANE SHELTON F
OREGO the cake and decorations. If ever there was a good time to take a step back
and take a deep yoga breath, it is now. No doubt there’s a lot of Windows
Server 2003 out there. We see it first- hand working with customers doing deep-core licensing analysis because we have to know where all the VMs, clusters, and servers are to determine the best ways to pay for it all. We’ve all read the statistics, and our work with customers confirms it—Windows Server 2003 is still a workhorse, even in today’s modern data centers. The risks are obvious—just read
the news to find another story about a major security breach. Breaches involve data, and the data lives in data centers. So when Microsoft pulls the plug on Windows Server 2003 in July of 2015, some of that data is going to be connected to unsupported server infrastructure. And these days all of our data is under assault, at unprecedented intensity. The combination of
unsupported servers and unrelenting threats adds up to a bad mix. So we need to do something about it, as soon as possible. But what about the not so obvious?
Thanks for the Nudge, Windows Server 2003 The risks are real, and they
could have real costs, even painful consequences, if not managed properly. But let’s look at the Windows Server 2003 problem through a different lens—let’s look at this event as a transformative opportunity for our data centers. Windows Server 2003 is now, but let’s focus for a moment on what comes next. It’s imperative that we shift from
our comfort zone, and find a new server happy place. And let’s do it right, the best we can, with what we know. Avoid the temptation to patch and
plug, to act purely on speeds and feeds. All those Windows Server 2003 servers and VMs have to go somewhere, right?
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A new kit running a new OS? Should we standardize on 2008 R2, or move up to 2012 R2? Wait a minute, should those workloads even be in our data center, or are they better suited for the cloud? Okay, then whose cloud? Our private cloud, a co-lo, a public cloud, or a hybrid? There is so much to consider. Here’s my advice: since Windows
Server 2003 is leaving the picture, it’s the perfect time to take a step back and ask all of those questions (insert yoga breath here).
What should the next
revision of my information infrastructure look like?
A Revolutionary Evolution—Stay Tuned There is a bewildering array of new
technologies and choices, all arriving at a blinding pace. Intel® calls what is happening today the Third Industrial
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