Welcome!

Big Data Journal Authors: Pat Romanski, Elizabeth White, Maureen O'Gara, Wiqar Chaudry, Sebastian Kruk

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, SOA & WOA, .NET, Virtualization, Silverlight, Big Data Journal

Cloud Expo: Article

Windows Server 2003 EOL – What You Need to Know Now

AppZero can move applications to the cloud and move to a new version of an OS at the same time, and fast

IT departments hate end of life of products and the resulting headaches. End of life for a product means the support lifeline disappears, security updates stop and IT is left stranded with the compliance team breathing down their neck. Upgrade projects are not a fun sell to the business. "Hey, Ms./Mr. Business, let's invest a bunch of money and time to get the same place you were before"... Gee, let's get out the drill bit and do a root canal while we're at it.

For the Windows 2003 Server family you should know the following:

  • On July 13, 2010 Mainstream Support for Windows Server 2003 family ended.
  • On July 14, 2015 Extended Support for Windows Server 2003 family will end.

**Microsoft's product support lifecycle information can be found here

If you dive into the details of Mainstream Support and Extended Support you will see that you get nothing once Extended Support ends. Nothing, nada, zilch - you are on your own. No more paid support, no security updates, no product-specific information available in the online Microsoft knowledge base or support site to find answers to technical questions. Check here for the official Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ.

At this phase in a product's lifecycle, the software company is putting a gun to your head and saying upgrade or die.

No one is going to argue (at least not strongly) in favor of running business applications on an operating system that does not get security updates. Compliance teams will see this as a huge risk and will move heaven and earth to remediate it. In the next 12 months many IT departments around the world will be assembling WS2003 EOL SWAT teams to address this challenge. This will be like a mini Y2K forcing function for most enterprise IT departments.

Recently, we at AppZero were helping an enterprise division evaluate moving to the cloud with one of our SI partners, and the following picture of their regional data center emerged. The population of machines in the data center was slightly over 80% Windows Server and only detailed for Windows population of machines as outlined below:

Percent

Count

 


Description

10%

22

 


2008 Standard edition

9%

21

 


2008 (R2) Standard edition

2%

5

 


2008 (R2 Enterprise edition

61%

140

 


2003 Standard edition

15%

35

 


2003 Enterprise addition x64

2%

5

 


Windows 2000

100%

228


Total

It should be noted that this is a division of a Fortune 500 company that has been in business for well over 70 years. Obviously if you work at a company that was founded in the last 10 years you don't have a machine population anything like this.

The data shows that more than 75% of machines were running on operating systems that are 10 years old or older. These products have outdated diagnostics and management features, and without access to patches are a growing risk. The desire to transform the data center (i.e. move to some type of cloud) and modernize (i.e. dump old environments and run on newer ones) became very clear.

And that's where AppZero comes in. We can move applications to the cloud and move to a new version of an OS at the same time, and fast. You can see AppZero in action modernizing enterprise applications in this short video: Migrating SQL Server from Windows 2000 to Windows 2012 in minutes

Here are some key questions for your organization to consider as Windows Server 2003 approaches end of life

  • How many machines in your operations are running Windows 2003?
  • Do you have a plan to remediate the risk of WS2003 EOL?
  • How are you going to upgrade or move to a more modern operating environment?
  • Does moving to the cloud solve this soon-to-be compliance problem?

In the next blog post we will detail options and challenges in upgrading an operating system. Also we'llprovide insight to why Windows Server upgrade occurrences are less likely than being struck by lightning. Anyone who has upgraded more than 1 production Windows Server machine in the past 6 months please connect with me via email or tweet about it using hashtag #WS2003eol.

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me at @gregoryjoconnor. Remember to use hashtag #WS2003eol.

More Stories By Greg O'Connor

Greg O'Connor is President & CEO of AppZero. Pioneering the Virtual Application Appliance approach to simplifying application-lifecycle management, he is responsible for translating Appzero's vision into strategic business objectives and financial results.

O'Connor has over 25 years of management and technical experience in the computer industry. He was founder and president of Sonic Software, acquired in 2005 by Progress Software (PRGS). There he grew the company from concept to over $40 million in revenue.

At Sonic, he evangelized and created the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product category, which is generally accepted today as the foundation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Follow him on Twitter @gregoryjoconnor.

Cloud Expo Breaking News
In the face of rapidly increasing amounts of unstructured data, industry is investing heavily to turn machines into services and connect them to analytics engines that will extract an extraordinary amount of value and unleash a productivity revolution for both businesses and consumers. In the health care, transportation and energy sectors alone, the combination of machine diagnostics software and analytics will eliminate as much as $150 billion in waste. In his session at the 12th Internation...
The economics of business are radically changing due to the way in which software and services are being delivered thanks to cloud computing. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Mike Kavis will cover six reasons for the disruption.
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
New, "Super-Sized" 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued. Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...
If zettabytes of data exist, why is less than 1% of the world’s data being analyzed today? Seasoned entrepreneur and startup CEO Radhika Subramanian believes that the inability to analyze and gain value from Big Data is that organizations are taking a services-centered approach. As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to autom...
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how. In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMB...
Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time consuming effort that requires experts. In his upcoming session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Michael Kopp will be showing how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the crit...