Enterprise Abilities for Mission-Critical Needs

Windows Server Meets the Demands of Mission Critical Workloads
No matter what business you are in, certain applications and systems are vital to the daily operation and long-term success of your enterprise. E-mail, databases, and other business applications require the most reliable, scalable, and secure operating system platform to achieve maximum performance and reliability. To support these important workloads, Microsoft offers three high-end editions of Windows Server 2008 to enable businesses to compete and succeed in today’s economy by providing high availability, virtualization, scalability, security, and identity management. Choosing between the different editions of Windows Server 2008 is not merely a feature comparison, but a strategic decision for businesses that are seeking to solve specific problems and meet IT needs.

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise helps provide unprecedented levels of system uptime, the latest security advances, and the scalability to support the growth of mission-critical applications. It also provides a cost-effective way to realize the benefits of virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Enterprise is an optimal operating system for servers running applications such as networking, messaging, inventory, databases, and customer service systems.

Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter delivers an enterprise-class platform for deploying business-critical applications and large-scale virtualization on small and large servers. The Datacenter edition enables you to:
  • Improve availability with clustering and dynamic hardware partitioning capabilities.
  • Reduce infrastructure costs by consolidating applications with unlimited virtualization licensing rights.
  • Scale from 2 to 64 processors. Windows Server 2008 Datacenter provides a foundation on which to build enterprise-class virtualization and scale-up solutions.
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems provides a solid foundation for demanding business-critical applications. This edition enables you to:
  • Scale solutions to meet ever-growing IT needs with support for up to 64 processors and 2 terabytes of RAM.
  • Deliver highly available solutions with eight-node clusters and dynamic partitioning capabilities, such as hot add/replace processor and RAM.
  • Take advantage of virtualization to consolidate servers and reduce costs with unlimited virtual instance rights.
Combined with the reliability, availability, and scalability features of the Itanium processor and server hardware, Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems provides an enterprise-class foundation for large databases, line-of-business applications, and custom applications.

In addition, Microsoft’s investments in management and interoperability solutions help customers build and maintain more productive systems.

Microsoft System Center is a family of leading IT management solutions that help you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment. These enterprise class tools build on the built-in, easy to use management tools that are integrated into all Microsoft server products. Since virtually all enterprise datacenters have a diverse set of platforms and applications, a true enterprise platform must provide for cross-platform interoperability. Interoperability has long been a feature of Microsoft’s technologies, achieved through extensive work with customers, partners, competitors, governments, and standards-setting organizations.

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive data management and business intelligence platform that provides enterprise-class scalability, data warehousing, advanced analytics, and security for running business-critical applications. With this edition, you can consolidate servers and perform large-scale online transactional processing and reporting.

The resources below provide more detailed information on Microsoft’s vision for addressing enterprise system needs and highlight several customers who have selected Windows Server over UNIX to achieve superior reliability, scalability, security, manageability and interoperability.

White Papers and Resources
Reliability, Availability, and Scalability with High-End Editions
Find out about features of the high-end editions of Windows Server 2008, and learn about scenarios in which these editions can help meet your business needs. The enhanced features in Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, and Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems deliver new and improved functionalities coupled with superior performance to provide high availability, virtualization, scalability, and security in the most demanding business environments.
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Enterprise Solutions
Growth and rapid developments in new technologies may have resulted in data center and desktop infrastructures that are overly complex, inflexible, and difficult to manage with built-in costs that are not only high, but somewhat fixed regardless of changing business requirements. Windows Server 2008 provides key solutions and functionality to meet the enterprise business challenges of increasing security, reducing costs, and enhancing productivity.
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Enterprise Business Scenarios
Windows Server 2008 provides powerful features that help businesses maximize the flexibility, availability, and control of their servers while reducing costs and enhancing IT performance. Windows Server for the Enterprise addresses critical scenarios and solutions related to high availability, virtualization, scalability, identity and access management, as well as integration with Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
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Windows Server 2008 Security Guide
Windows Server 2008 is engineered from the ground up with security in mind, delivering an array of new and improved security technologies and features that provide a solid foundation for running and building your business. To help you quickly configure, deploy, and manage the security settings in Windows Server 2008 across your organization,
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High Availability
Providing high availability to mission-critical applications, services, and data is a primary objective of successful IT departments. When services are down or fail, business continuity is interrupted, which can result in significant losses. Windows Server 2008 supports two key high-availability features to help organizations meet their uptime requirements for their critical systems: Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing (NLB).
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Performance Benchmarks
Take advantage of SQL Server 2008’s industry-leading performance and scalability for real-world database workloads with the lowest cost of operation, as verified by Microsoft partners and industry-standard Transaction Processing Performance Council’s TPC.
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Migrating Business-Critical Applications from UNIX to Windows and Itanium 2-Based Servers
Ideas International: Learn how Itanium 2-based platforms offer you maximum scalability and flexibility for Windows Server workloads.
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Scalable Windows Servers for the Datacenter
IDC (March 2006): The Windows computing environment has matured in many ways in recent years, allowing workloads that formerly ran on other operating environments to move to Windows systems.
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UNIX Interoperability in Microsoft Windows Server
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 both extend the Windows Server operating system by providing smooth interoperability with UNIX-based systems.
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Case Studies
First American Title Insurance Company
To gain enterprise-grade stability and faster performance, First American Title Insurance Company united its disparate IT systems by implementing the Microsoft® Application Platform. First American is now realizing faster performance, greater systems stability, and improved ease of use from its Microsoft solution.
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REALTECH
International consulting firm REALTECH is helping its customers gain a lower total cost of ownership, integration efficiencies, and ease of use by migrating from Oracle/UNIX to the Microsoft Application Platform, including SQL Server.
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CSR
By migrating its SAP infrastructure from UNIX/Oracle to the Microsoft® Application Platform, Australian manufacturer CSR is experiencing lower total cost of ownership, enhanced performance, ease of migration, and improved enterprise integration across its multinational enterprise.
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Kimball International
By switching from the Oracle/UNIX stack to a Microsoft solution, US furniture and electronics manufacturer Kimball International experienced lower total cost of ownership, greater processing power, improved manageability, and decreased migration times.
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Sony Ericsson Migrates SAP from UNIX to Windows Server, Boosts Reliability, Cuts Cost
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, decided to migrate its SAP system to Microsoft Windows-based servers running on Intel Itanium2-based computers. As a result, reliability is up, with the company saving a day per year in unplanned downtime.
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RadioShack Improves Reliability and Security, and Saves Millions of Dollars by Moving to Windows
After an extensive evaluation, RadioShack replaced its UNIX servers with Microsoft Windows Server software for its point-of-sale (POS) servers. The results are improved security and reliability for entire POS environment and cost savings through a reduction in servers and simplified management.
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