How Windows Server 2008 R2 Cuts Your IT Costs

Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 R2 is the company's most powerful general server operating system to date and it introduces a number of new capabilities. For many organizations its greatest attraction is the large number of new features designed to help cut IT-related costs through enhanced virtualization, advanced power management, simpler administration, and more advanced networking technologies.

Low-Cost, Highly Available Virtualized Infrastructure
Virtualizing servers using the enhanced version of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor released with Windows Server 2008 R2 allows you to cut the number of physical servers you need in your data center, while using those physical servers that you retain far more efficiently. Many organizations run their servers at average utilization rates as low as 10 to 15 percent, but using Hyper-V virtualization it is practical to increase these rates to around 70 percent. Reducing the number of physical servers that need to be purchased and maintained — and the corresponding reduction in power and cooling costs and data center space required — can lead to dramatic IT infrastructure cost savings.

Windows Server 2008 R2 provides a cost-effective way to run virtualized environments that are highly available thanks to new features such as Live Migration and enhancements to failover clustering and network load balancing. Live Migration is a feature built in to the new version of Hyper-V that enables you to move running virtual machines from one physical host to another without interruption in the event of hardware failure, or to enable planned maintenance, or simply to redeploy the original host more efficiently.

Support for Hyper-V has also been integrated into Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager, making it possible to manage a Hyper-V virtualized environment with the same features as a VMware environment at one-third of the cost, according to Microsoft research.

Reduced Power Costs
Aside from the power savings you can realize through virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2 can reduce your energy costs thanks to a number of power consumption management features that enable physical hardware to run more efficiently — in some cases up to 18 percent more efficiently than when the same hardware is running Windows Server 2003 — without any specialist configuration.

These features include Core Parking, which moves all processing onto the smallest number of cores possible while putting the remaining, unneeded cores into a "sleep" state to save energy. Since servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 can have a maximum of 256 cores, the potential for energy savings — and related cost savings — is great. Windows Server 2008 R2 can also reduce the ACPI "P-state" of each processor, reducing power consumption whenever it is not experiencing peaks in demand.

Understanding power consumption is a key to reducing it, and Windows Server 2008 R2 includes power measurement features that can provide you with a greater insight into your power consumption profile. These can be analyzed using Windows PowerShell scripts or third-party products, or fed directly into Microsoft's System Center management suite to be integrated with other management data.

Windows Server 2008 R2 can also help you reduce the power consumption of your desktop machines. That's because it includes new Active Directory Group Policy Objects that provide you with highly granular control over the power consumption of Windows Vista and Windows 7 clients. That means large numbers of desktop machines can be put into appropriate power saving modes overnight or on weekends automatically after any administrative tasks such as virus scanning or defragmenting have been carried out.

Simplified Management
Server administration can be a big drain on time and money, but Windows Server 2008 R2 makes it easier to administer your server infrastructure using fewer resources, making your budget go further by freeing up IT staff to work on more productive projects. In some cases organizations that implemented Windows Server 2008 R2 experienced an 80 percent decrease in the amount of time spent on administrative tasks like file system management.

Windows Server 2008 R2's Server Manager, for example, can be used for the remote administration of other servers — including those at branch offices — using graphical management consoles. This means that administrators can easily stay on top of all of your servers from a single centralized location, cutting down on wasted travel time and providing the ability to carry out routine tasks in a more timely fashion. And PowerShell 2.0, the enhanced version of the command-line shell and scripting language introduced in Windows Server 2008, makes it easy to automate regular, repetitive tasks that can otherwise occupy a large proportion of staff time. It includes more than 240 pre-built cmdlets, and provides powerful scripting capabilities that can be used to automate everything from server deployment to the custom automation of tasks specific to your organization.

Better Networking
Staff at remote branch offices often suffer high latency while accessing content stored on servers at main office data centers due to relatively low-bandwidth (but expensive) WAN links. Windows Server 2008 R2 can help increase performance without incurring high bandwidth costs thanks to a feature called BranchCache. BranchCache caches corporate content on a local Windows Server 2008 R2 machine (or other Windows 7 clients), speeding up access times for Windows 7 clients in these branch offices, and in some cases enabling organizations to cut their WAN bandwidth costs by more than 50 percent.

Using Windows Server 2008 R2 in your organization can also save on virtual private networking (VPN) and remote user management costs thanks to a technology called DirectAccess. This new networking technology provides Windows 7 users with a secure connection to your corporate network from anywhere automatically — without the need for potentially expensive third-party VPN solutions. When clients are connected using DirectAccess administrators can see and manage remote users as if they were on the corporate network, so there is no need to spend time and money on remote management policies or remote software deployment and patching systems.

Windows Server 2008 R2 has many other benefits to offer your organization in the long term as it grows — scalability and interoperability with Linux and UNIX systems to name but two. But for many organizations the greatest attraction is the possibilities it presents for substantial cost cutting that can be achieved almost immediately.