Mission-Critical Operations Overview

Mission-critical applications are the essential programs on which your organization depends to get work done. These applications directly affect the company’s ability to generate revenue, maintain high customer satisfaction, keep employees productive, and sometimes prevent disasters.

For these reasons, your organization must carefully decide which platform to use for running these vital applications. As IT organizations evaluate these alternatives, they often make a decision by weighing each platform against a common set of requirements: Will it be reliably available in demanding scenarios and scale as usage grows? Will it be secure? How difficult is it to manage and service? What applications and partners are available to assist with planning and implementation?

Mission critical applications are often designed for fault tolerance, and their development and maintenance typically follow a rigorous methodology. Their design may incorporate regulatory requirements such as security and auditing. Your IT platform needs to support all of this, as well as the ability to handle changes as your organization grows and your requirements shift.

Microsoft has deepened its commitment to support the most demanding workloads in recent years, with continual improvements coming in each new release. The Microsoft Application Platform provides a full set of technologies that are ready to support your most critical applications. Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008  is highly available, scalable, secure, manageable, and quick to recover from disaster.  Microsoft® SQL Server® provides the highest levels of performance, reliability, and scalability for your business-critical applications. The Microsoft® .NET Framework provides a consistent model to build and customize your applications.  Microsoft System Center  manages your system so that all servers and devices are automatically updated, performance and health are monitored, and data is backed up.

Customers are responding to the increased capability of the Microsoft Application Platform for example, Kimball International  moved their SAP applications from an Oracle database using a Unix/RISC infrastructure to a Windows environment and the Microsoft SQL Server database. Today, the company finds that its investment has proven itself with virtually no unplanned downtime in the past year — running on an infrastructure that saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Your Mission-Critical Systems

Scalability

With each release of Windows Server, Microsoft has successfully evolved the platform to support demanding high-performance workloads. Culminating in its current Windows Server 2008 R2 release, Microsoft continues to improve its high-performance software capabilities while taking full advantage of the newest availability and reliability features being offered by server hardware manufacturers. For example, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2  and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2  now scale to 256 logical processors.

Performance

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2  is setting records for performance and price/performance on industry standard benchmarks. TPC-E benchmark tests  on SQL Server 2008 R2 found the top four performance results and the top/price performance result were held by SQL Server 2008 R2. Application vendors like SAP, Siemens, and others are also demonstrating the benefits of running on SQL Server. For example, a recent benchmark testing results from PTC showed that some Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill 9.1 operations performed up to 88 percent faster on SQL Server 2005 than on a competitor’s database, with an average performance advantage of approximately 10 percent.

Transaction Processing

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a comprehensive data platform that provides the scalability, availability, security, and manageability that you need for Mission-Critical Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications. Over time your transactional volumes can grow exponentially as you are required to support more users and as those users require access to more data. From an IT perspective, MySpace has been in a continual race to keep up with the demands of constant growth, as MySpace is one of the fastest growing Web sites of all time. Using the Microsoft Application Platform, they are able to support 4.4 million users and 18,000 messages per second at peak times.

Availability

Networking with the Microsoft Application Platform provides high availability to mission critical applications, services, and data. With multi-site clustering, virtualization, business continuity features, and the ability to dynamically detect failures and reallocate resources, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to always  keep your mission critical systems available. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a full range of options to maintain appropriate levels of application availability and support your high availability strategy.

Security

Because security flaws can bring down a mission critical operation, it’s critical that the every piece of the application – including the operating system, the database, and the way that identity and access is handled – needs to be highly secure.   Advanced security features such as policy-based management, data encryption, and granular auditing are included in Standard, Enterprise, and Workgroup SQL Server editions. Secure engineering processes as a part of the Trustworthy Computing Initiative  have resulted in SQL Server being built on a highly secure foundation. . In addition, Microsoft Forefront  protects your mission-critical system from malware by protecting clients, servers, and the network edge. The Microsoft Application Platform identifies users across the network and provides access to all appropriate programs through features integrated into many of the platform’s tools.

Manageability

Microsoft System Center lowers resolution times and improves compliance. You can manage the entire server lifecycle with a single familiar toolset for physical and virtual infrastructure, reducing both complexity and risk. Dynamic response to workload requirements results in optimized utilization of datacenter resources.