Windows Server 2003 and the industry refresh that never was Tight budgets and the cloud were among the reasons companies didn’t sign off migration projects for Windows Server 2003 in their droves, as customers ignored big vendors' security scare tactics. So say some of the largest tech suppliers in the market, who had estimated a bit of a server sales bump both before and after …
Some are still on 2000 - one of our customers complained when we ditched support for 2000 a few years ago, so we re-instated it. This time round, we asked again if they had had the time to migrate in the meantime ... nope!
Apparently their last Windows Server in the data center is still on 2000 Advanced Server.
But Windows admins are not the only nostalgic in our customer base, one HP-UX/Solaris shop (yes, they have both), are on kit dating back to the mid 90's, no idea where they get the spares for that, though.
Solaris is not so much a problem for us, however, our HP-UX kit from that time is long gone ...
While I mostly concur with your assessment of the cloud, the problem is the headline isn't misleading. The people who spend the money are moving us to the cloud no matter how idiotic it looks to you and me.
I'm contracted for support work in a government office, the last place that should be moving to the cloud. And I'm told the plans going forward are to move to a Citrix architecture where the desktops are all virtual with a target of having a BYOD system with workers supplying their own equipment "because everybody owns their own laptop. Heck, if I plug a screen, mouse and keyboard into my iPhone 6, I can replicate my work environment wherever I am."
Yeah, the plan has some good points. But I also think it is being way oversold.
So the assumption here seems to be the ONLY choices are 1) Stay with 2003, 2) Buy 2012, 3) Cloud, and the lack of sales means people are staying with 2003. What if the choice is "none of the above?", they are moving things to Linux or (god forbid) OSX Server or the like? If they are continuing to run the same software they ran on 2003, then (if the software runs) 2012 may be the way to go. If they are replacing the whole enchilada, there's 0 reason to stick with Windows.
In our case, none of the above!
We are moving our Windows servers to FreeNAS. We will still run a couple of Windows servers where we absolutely HAVE to. But, we have a few existing Win 2008 server licenses for servers that are running Win 2003 now. Those servers (only three) will be upgraded to Win 2008, and will be the only remaining Windows servers. They will be moved off of Windows by the time support for Win 2008 ends.
Our current ERP system (accounting, inventory, invoicing, etc) already runs on Red Hat. Serving files can be done with FreeNAS. We are currently working on moving any in-house developed apps to MySQL/MariaDB. We have the source for all of them, so moving off of SQL server is not insurmountable.
There are no plans for ever seeing a Windows 2012 server in our data center.
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