SQL 2008 End of Support: What’s Next?

Three new Azure services are now available for Canadian data centres, Microsoft announced last week: M-Series Virtual Machines, NC-V3 Series (GPU series) Virtual Machines and SQL Managed Instances.

“Canadian businesses are starting to truly recognize the value and business impact that comes along with adopting AI and cloud capabilities,” Khalil Alfar, general manager of Azure Cloud and enterprises business division for Microsoft Canada, wrote in a blog post.

Global AI spending is expected to reach $47 billion by 2020 thanks to AI and cloud computing changing the way industries think. Microsoft says the M-Series virtual machines offer the highest vCPU count (from eight to 128 hyper-threaded vCPUs) and largest memory (from 192 GB up to 4 TB) of any VM in the cloud, all powered by Intel Xeon 2.5 GHz E7-8890 v3 processors. Alfar wrote customers who have their data in Azure allows them to leverage Platform-as-a-Service offerings to run SAP workloads.

“With the capabilities and infrastructure to handle large in-memory workloads involving big datasets, companies are already maximizing its high-performance potential by moving SAP HANA applications to the cloud, since M-series VMs are SAP certified for all SAP workloads,” he said. “The move provides cost efficiencies, reduces commercial and technical risks, offers economies of scale, and allows customers greater access to their data.”

Microsoft says organizations still running SQL 2008/R2 can extend their legacy database’s life after the end of support date (July 9, 2019) by moving it to Azure SQL MI.

As Microsoft’s aging server operating system and a database management system face an impending end, Turbonomic is using the opportunity to unveil its latest cloud assessment and migration capabilities for Azure.

Microsoft has announced plans to discontinue technical support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, meaning anyone still on those systems will need to migrate over to Azure. Turbonomic has attached new reserved instance (RI) – also known as pre-paid capacity – purchasing capabilities for Microsoft Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Site Recovery (ASR) integration, meaning customers’ journey to the cloud can be completed with precision.

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when migrating to the cloud is allocating more free space to improve performance than actually required, which leads to exorbitant costs, said Bob Wambach, Turbonomic’s vice-president of product marketing. Figuring out what kind of RI one should purchase is complex and usually takes months, and if the wrong investments are made, an organization can end up spending way more than needed due to pre-paid RIs going to waste.

“This is one of the big shocks that customers get when they migrate to the cloud. They suddenly realize the cloud is far more expensive than they had anticipated,” he told CDN.

Turbonomic’s latest RI capabilities for Azure uses an algorithm that produces a detailed analysis of what an organization’s requirements are on premises first, and then calculates the best way to run those workloads, and minimize those costs, on the cloud.

Wambach says Turbonomic is now one of Microsoft’s preferred partners for helping customers migrate to Azure.

“Microsoft is really applying policies to direct customers to Azure,” he said, adding the tech giant is leaning on its partner community to facilitate that goal. Wambach pointed to Canadian partners Long View Systems, Quisitive and Softchoice as examples of companies helping customers migrate to Azure in Canada.

“Canada has been fairly aggressive when it comes to adopting cloud and container technologies,” he said. “We are fortunate enough to not only have strong partners there, but a lot of our technical leaders are located in Canada.”