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Consolidating? Less can definitely run more. Windows Server 2008 changes the game with innovations that give your servers legs of steel, even under highly demanding workloads.
When you have servers that run faster, longer, more securely, and with less downtime, it can transform your day, your department, and your whole enterprise. Just give it your command and get on with your day.
• A new, reduced Server Core installation option lets you install only the services and features you need.
• You have less to maintain, fewer patches to install, and fewer disruptions.
• A smaller attack surface helps reduce your vulnerabilities to hacks, attacks, and downtime.
• Makes it easy to configure, manage, and migrate highly available server clusters that can automatically shift workloads to help ensure the availability of applications and services — 24/7/365.
• The new validation wizard automates the testing and implementation of clusters.
• A powerful new command shell and scripting language that enables you to automate key system administration tasks.
• Quickly execute changes across multiple servers, and reduce downtime.
• No need to migrate existing scripts.
Schooled in the art of self-defense, Windows Server 2008 is loaded with innovative safety features that actively guard your data against intrusions and help protect you from disruptions that cause harm to your business and your reputation. Pity the fool who tangles with IT 24-7.
• In a mobile world, Network Access Protection helps provide proactive protection by isolating computers that don't comply with your security policy.
• A new type of domain controller designed for branch offices or edge sites.
• Offers rapid, one-way authentication, so only local user credentials are stored, helping to protect highly sensitive information from hackers.
• Minimizes the surface area of the kernel, reducing vulnerability to attack.
Change happens. Your servers should be nimble and innovative enough to manage updates on the fly, with minimal downtime for changes, new implementations, and upgrades. Sorry, you'll still need to get your own coffee.
• A powerful new command shell and task-based scripting language that enables you to automate key system administration tasks.
• It helps you quickly address management issues across multiple servers without disruption.
• By reducing disruptions, it helps you maximize uptime.
• And there's no need to migrate existing scripts.
A Web-driven business is the last place where you want to see downtime. Customers (internal or external) come for a fast, highly secure, and rewarding experience. The innovations in Windows Server 2008 help you deliver with style, intelligence, and robotic efficiency.
• It can automatically isolate sites, applications, and configurations to help prevent clashes, crashes, and downtime.
• Install only the components you need, to minimize the attack surface of your Web capabilities and reduce the potential for disruptions.
• Find problems fast; improved management features make it easy to thoroughly understand, diagnose, and resolve issues before they become problems.
Why pay for virtualization when it’s built right into Windows Server 2008? You can virtualize the most demanding workloads at a lower TCO, while increasing availability. Hyper-V is designed to work with your existing environment and a broad range of Microsoft and 3rd party management tools, allowing you to automate key tasks.
• Consolidate 64-bit and 32-bit workloads, while reducing TCO.
• Support for multiple operating systems and workloads, to enable broad consolidation
• Create highly available virtualization environment—along with fine-grained resource controls.
• Designed to work with Microsoft System Center and a broad range of 3rd party tools.
• Supports automation through scripting and Windows PowerShell®
• Utilize your existing tools to manage patching, provisioning, monitoring, and other functions.
TALX is a provider of Equifax Workforce Solutions in the form of Web-based human resource and employment verification services for more than 9,000 clients, including many Fortune 500 companies and 25,000 employment-verification customers. Their future depends on their ability to continually evolve new services and bring them to market quickly-while also cutting costs.
To do that, TALX deployed Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which allowed product teams to self-manage virtual machine environments in order to maximize their ability to develop new products efficiently, reduce costs, and to maintain a competitive advantage.
Today, they host almost 70 virtual machines on more than a dozen physical servers. And TALX developers perform QA testing on another dozen virtual machines hosted on five physical servers. In addition, they're using Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 to improve the administration and performance of its infrastructure environment in a cost-effective manner.
By using Hyper-V to enhance virtualization performance and host more virtual machines per physical server, TALX will be able to further consolidate its server environment, reduce hardware costs, save power and cooling costs, and conserve data center space.
"Using Hyper-V to attain a virtual to physical ratio of 4:1, we expect to save at least $5,000 per server per year, directly out of infrastructure costs for energy and hardware maintenance. We view this as key to our continued effort to drive innovation and deliver agility to our business and our customers."
Bryan Garcia
Vice President of Technology
TALX
By unleashing the power of Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™, TALX can move quickly and confidently ahead of its customer needs.
With over 10,000 employees and over 300 servers spread across four major sites and several smaller practices throughout New Hampshire, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) had a big, increasingly crowded data center. To help save money, streamline management, reduce maintenance, and improve availability, they moved their virtualization infrastructure to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™.
Today, DHMC runs both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 as guest operating systems under Hyper-V, as well as Red Hat Linux. They've virtualized Web servers, sites on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, reporting servers, medical applications, domain controllers, file and printer servers, and Citrix servers-as well as its most demanding applications.
As a result, they've achieved higher application availability for patient critical applications, simplified server management, and created more stable backup practices. Thanks to Hyper-V, they expect to reduce their total server holdings by 75 percent and save up to $4,300 per server in hardware, maintenance, electrical, and real estate costs.
"We used to accept a certain amount of downtime for our critical scheduling and operating room monitoring applications, and manually intervene to redirect applications to different systems if a server fails. It now takes about an hour to bring them back up. With Hyper-V, we can move affected applications to new servers without users even knowing, completely eliminating downtime."
Robert McShinsky
Senior Systems Administrator
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
By unleashing the power of Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™, DHMC is able to do what they do best: focus on serving their patients rather than maintaining their servers.
Starbucks is known around the globe as a fast-growing retail company that delivers the ideal coffee experience to its customers. This is due, in no small part, to excellent customer service and expert baristas. So the identity management system Starbucks employees and external partners use to sign in and begin work is crucial to the company's success.
To ensure that the system could keep up with the company's plans for global growth, Starbucks sought a robust, flexible, and scalable technical platform that could help improve security, lower costs, and reduce system management complexity.
In the end, they hired Windows Server 2008 to play a key role in a global IT infrastructure that supports more than 20,000 Active Directory accounts on 835 physical and virtual Windows Servers.
Windows Server 2008 delivers innovations like the Server Core installation option and Identity and Access Management tools. Starbucks gets a streamlined deployment that delivers increased scalability and greater availability. And the smaller OS footprint reduces the attack surface to help improve security and uptime.
The Server Core installation option is key to Starbucks as they upgrade their current Active Directory environment. By installing Windows Server 2008 domain controllers, Starbucks expects to reduce the number of domains required and ultimately reduce complexity, administration time, and operational costs.
"Windows Server 2008 will prove to be an invaluable resource as Starbucks continues to expand our worldwide operations. Active Directory running on the Server Core installation option of Windows Server 2008 will enable us to efficiently scale to support our global business growth, simplify overall management complexity and reduce our current operational costs."
Abe Hong
Director, IT Strategy and Planning
Global IT Infrastructure
Starbucks Coffee Company
Unleashing the power of Windows Server 2008 helped Starbucks lay the foundation for global IT expansion.
Every month more than 40 million unique visitors from all over the world show up at Dell.com looking for a new computer, server, TV, or other technology. Fortunately, there's a very reliable employee working the door.
Today, Dell.com is one of the largest e-commerce sites, by revenue, in the world. So when Dell saw how Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 could give them the ability to deliver a richer Web experience to their customers on a robust, easy-to-manage Web application platform, it didn't take a 64-bit multi-core processor to make the decision.
With IIS 7.0, they get automated application isolation, which prevents their Web sites and applications from interfering with one another. It's easier to diagnose and resolve issues. And because they have less software running at once, their Web capabilities have a smaller attack surface.
So even with the all-important holiday retail season fast approaching, they began moving their North American Web infrastructure to Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0—with the rest of their U.S.-facing servers expected to follow. It's an unusual move for any retail environment, but for Dell.com the gains outweighed the risks.
"Dell.com is committed to simplifying IT for our customers, as well as for ourselves. That's why we chose to utilize Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 to strengthen and evolve our online business. Windows Server 2008 with IIS7 offered such important improvements to Dell.com that we began rolling it out during the busiest and most important time of the year. That's how confident we were that it would improve our online performance."
Sona Chawla
Vice President
Global Online
Dell
By unleashing the power of their servers, Dell.com found a reliable way to keep their doors open, their customers satisfied, and the merchandise moving.
Having a fleet of planes doesn't make you an airline. No crew means no flight and no business. So the Web-based Crew Communications System (CCS) is absolutely critical to the success of Continental Airlines. For 18,000 crewmembers around the world whose only office is an airplane, it's their primary source for information, communications, and scheduling.
That means the CCS needs to be up, available, and ready to fly 24/7/365, so crews around the world can access flight schedules, put in for vacations and sick days, and trade trips with other crewmembers. It's one highly functional and extremely critical alarm clock.
Historically, CCS has been supported by 11 servers running Windows 2000 Server, but since reviewing the new Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 in Windows Server 2008, Continental Airlines has begun migrating more of CCS over. Why? Their developers saw the extensibility and monitoring features would lead to improved reliability—crucial for this vital system.
That really comes into play on Trip Trade Day, the one day a month when pilots and flight attendants are allowed to barter with each other over desired routes and days off. It's not uncommon for CCS to receive requests from 2,400
Today, six of the 17 servers supporting CCS are running Windows Server 2008. This year, they will also move E-res, the flight reservation system for some 42,000 Continental Airlines employees, to Windows Server 2008. Whatever you give this server to do, it just wants more.
"When we saw what Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 could do for us, we were hooked. The diagnostic and reporting tools are great and being able to troubleshoot quickly and efficiently is huge. We're running our most important internal applications on it and we've been able to reduce the number of servers needed, while ensuring that our crews show up on time."
Dawn E. Getteau
Systems Engineer
Continental Airlines
By unleashing the power of its servers, Continental Airlines also found a reliable way to unleash the power of its flight crews on a timely basis.
And put Windows Server 2008 to your toughest test.
