Mike Philpott is Datashare's Operations Director, and as such gets involved with clients at all stages of the Data Centre deployment lifecycle. Here he talks about one of the fundamental building blocks of the Data Centre - Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 - it's just another upgrade to Windows Server isn't it?

Well for me the huge leap forward came with the release of Windows Server 2008 to replace Windows 2003. This was the biggest jump in Windows technology since Windows 2000 replaced Windows NT 4.0, but I think that in many ways it passed people by somewhat because the usual "let's give it six months after its release" approach took us into late 2008 when suddenly pretty much every UK business began pulling budgets and going into cost-savings mode because of the rapidly worsening economic situation.

So no-one deployed Server 2008?

Far from it, we've worked with a number of clients integrating new Windows 2008 servers into their environment, in one case (Travers Smith) designing and building a brand new, "green field" Active Directory infrastructure using Windows 2008 AD. Without exception we've found that the whole deployment, management and support of Windows 2008 Server has been dramatically eased for systems administrators and support teams, whilst even more importantly it has provided a considerably more stable platform for the hosting of those critical applications such as Exchange that businesses now absolutely require to be fully available and performing well.

What's so good about it then?

Well like I said, in the simplest terms the integrated Server Manager that brings together all of the administrative features like the ability to deploy and manage roles and features on the server, do all of the housekeeping tasks such as disk management and check on running conditions via Event Manager, in itself makes administrative tasks much more simple and consume less time. More specialised administrative tasks such as Cluster Management are also massively simplified by bringing all of the relevant information such as Cluster Events into the Cluster Management console. But it's not just administrative improvements, the server architecture changes that have been made such as the ability to run servers without the GUI ("Server Core") and the ability to create "branch office" read-only domain controllers pave the way for organisations to take a more granular and fit-for-requirements approach to their server deployments without having to compromise security or administrative principals as they would previously have had to do. I could fill several pages up talking about the Windows Server 2008 feature set of course, but obviously I don't need to do so when someone else already has - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/default.aspx is a good reference point!

OK, you've made your point - but R2, what's that all about?

R2 appeared half way through last year and is pretty much what it says it is - a second release version of Windows 2008. There are a number of enhancements to the original release including some key virtualisation products and some further enhanced management, scalability and reliability features, but again there's a great source of information at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/whats-new.aspx. There are some great tools and features in there that will assist organisations who want more flexible working using previously unreliable VPN technologies for example; and the specific design features built in to R2 to allow tight integration with Windows 7 will help organisations who have had a couple of years forced infrastructure inertia to more quickly push ahead with upgrades and improvements.

Ah yes, infrastructure upgrades. Why would businesses want to do that?

In some cases they have very little choice. There are still a huge number of Windows 2000 servers out there and support for Windows 2000 ends this summer. In any case, there are a huge number of organisations out there who have been postponing infrastructure upgrades for any number of reasons, but that we are now seeing wanting to progress. Virtualisation is key amongst this - more and more people are seeing the real benefit that this brings in terms of cost and efficiency saving, and taking the opportunity to amalgamate back-end infrastructure upgrades and consolidation exercises into one streamlined project delivers economy of scale as well as brand new, futureproofed Windows infrastructures. But there are other reasons too - many organisations have had no real infrastructure refresh since blowing their budgets in 1999/2000 getting up to date for the millennium (remember that?) and are finding that they now have no alternative than to upgrade in order to support their business requirements and the applications that they need for that purpose. At the desktop level too, where many organisations held off deploying what seems to have become known as "the previous version of Windows" there seems to be a new appetite to look at Windows 7 deployments, and this in turn will drive back-end infrastructure improvements.

But what about Cloud Computing? Isn't that going to end the in-house Data Centre?

Absolutely. Just like we're all running nothing but Linux in our computer rooms now, as we were told ten years ago we would be. Just like no-one has a PC on their desk now but only ever uses thin client devices as we were also told. Just like we can all do everything we ever need to on our mobile devices. Etc.  But seriously, there's always a place for all new innovation as long as it's good enough and brings benefit, and Cloud Computing is no exception. But it's such a generic concept and obvious application of all the new virtualisation technologies that exist; as well as being a natural result of the ever-improving communications and web service developments that it will of course have a huge and increasing part to play as all of the analysts say it will. Datashare's Cerberus Backup and Restore services have been shipping customers' data back to our offsite Data Centre for years - isn't that an early form of Cloud Computing anyway? Customers have been using Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Mail filtering for years - same argument. What is happening now is a logical extension of that, and the emergence of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) will perhaps hasten the process for smaller business at least, some of whom will choose to host their entire IT infrastructure offsite at hosting centres such as ours.  All organisations will utilise some form of Cloud Computing, there is no doubt of that. But I've not yet met an IT Director or Manager, Risk Manager or anyone in any other similar role in any organisation of any significant size who has indicated that they are ready to let their core business-facing IT infrastructure out of their site (or out of their sight!). So do I think that 10 years from now the corporate computer room will be nothing but a distant memory? Not a chance. And we'll probably be talking about Windows Server 2020 R2 by then.