Decreasing Your IT Costs with Windows Server 2008 R2

Abhishek - For many organisations the greatest attraction of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 is the large number of new features designed to help cut IT-related costs, including enhanced virtualisation, advanced power management, simpler administration, and more advanced networking technologies.

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the company's most powerful general server operating system to date. Let’s examine some of the new money-saving features in detail.

Enhanced Virtualisation
Windows Server 2008 R2 includes an enhanced version of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation hypervisor that allows you to cut the number of physical servers you need in your data centre, whilst using those physical servers that you retain in a more efficient manner. Many organisations run their servers at average utilisation rates as low as 10 to 15 per cent, but Hyper-V virtualisation makes practical rates of around 70 per cent. Reducing the number of physical servers that need to be purchased and maintained — and the corresponding reduction in power and cooling costs and data centre space requirements — can lead to dramatic IT infrastructure cost savings.

New features such as Live Migration and enhancements to failover clustering and network load balancing in Windows Server 2008 R2 provide a cost-effective way to run virtualised environments that are highly available. Live Migration is built in to the new version of Hyper-V. It enables you to move virtual machines that are running from one physical host to another without interruption in the event of a hardware failure, 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 virtualised environment with the same features as a VMware environment at one-third of the cost, according to Microsoft research.

Reduced Power Costs
Virtualisation will help you save power, but Windows Server 2008 R2 can also 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 per cent more efficiently than when the same hardware is running Windows Server 2003 — without any special configuration.

Among these features is Core Parking, which moves all processing onto the smallest number of cores possible, whilst putting the remaining, unutilised cores into a "sleep" state to save energy. Servers that run Windows Server 2008 R2 can have a maximum of 256 cores, so 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.

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes power measurement features that can provide you with a greater insight into your power consumption profile, because understanding power consumption is a key to reducing it. Power consumption can be analysed 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 are carried out.

Simplified Management
Windows Server 2008 R2 makes it easier to administer your servers using fewer resources, which makes your budget go further and frees up IT staff to work on more productive projects. In some cases organisations that implement Windows Server 2008 R2 experience an 80 per cent decrease in the amount of time spent on administrative tasks like file system management.

Features such as Windows Server 2008 R2's Server Manager can be used for the remote administration of other servers — including those at branch offices — using graphical management consoles. This means that your administrators can easily stay on top of all of your servers from a single centralised location, cutting down on travel time and expenses, 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 organisation.

Better Networking
Employees accessing applications or data from branch offices often suffer high latency due to relatively low-bandwidth (but expensive) WAN links. Windows Server 2008 R2 can 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 the process, and in some cases enabling organisations to cut their WAN bandwidth costs by more than 50 per cent.

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