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Microsoft Server

Microsoft Windows Server is a multi-purpose server designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server or private cloud infrastructure. It provides you with powerful tools to react to business needs faster than ever before with greater control and confidence. Whether you want to consolidate servers, build a private cloud, or offer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the features of Windows Server enable you to take your server and desktop strategy to a new level.

Windows Server includes built in technologies such as virtualisation, remote access, branch connectivity, server security, web servers, clustering and performance improvements to help connect your employees, manage your datacentre more efficiently and reduce costs. The complexity and integration requirements of Microsoft Windows Server demands hands-on expertise and broad knowledge in designing and building cohesive end-to-end business technology solutions.

SaintGroup Managed Services can assist you to successfully configure Windows Servers in ways that align optimally with your business goals and ensure you get the greatest return on your investment.

Virtualisation

Virtualisation has transformed how datacentres are architected, organized, leveraged, and managed. Microsoft’s virtualisation technology Hyper-V is now built into the operating system rather than a separate product and provides you with both a powerful server platform and a full virtualisation engine in a single box. 

• With Hyper-V you can consolidate servers to deliver significant cost savings that directly affect your facilities costs, like power and cooling.

• Hyper-V can improve reliability and redundancy by easing the administrative burdens of mirrored servers, clustered servers, and rebuilding servers via software templates instead of lengthy installation and migration procedures.

• Hyper-V can combine with Microsoft's System Center virtualisation management suite to manage other hypervisors and virtual machines running operating systems other than Windows including VMware and Citrix platforms.

Management

Microsoft Windows Server also adds a host of new management consoles making tasks like Active Directory administration, server management, and virtualisation management easier and more intuitive. PowerShell is a simple scripting language that allows you to completely automate management tasks and create management workflows. Windows Server even includes 240 PowerShell pre-built scripts as well as a graphical user interface so your IT admins can create more scripts quickly and easily.

Security

Windows Server activates only the features required to perform the role that it has been assigned. The result is a more secure server, since unnecessary services are not enabled. Threats related to hacking, malware, viruses and even employee misuse of computing resources make security an important consideration for every system manager. The operating system has been hardened to protect against failure and several new technologies help prevent unauthorized connections to your networks, servers, data, and user accounts. Network Access Protection (NAP) helps ensure that computers that try to connect to your network comply with your organisation's security policy. Technology integration and several enhancements make Active Directory services a potent unified and integrated Identify and Access (IDA) solution. Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) and BitLocker Drive Encryption allow you to more securely deploy your AD database at branch office locations.

Power Consumption

Windows Server introduced a 'balanced' power policy, which monitors the utilisation level of the processors on the server and dynamically adjusts the processor performance states to limit power to the needs of the workload. Windows Server enhances this power saving feature by adding Core Parking and expanding on power-oriented Group Policy settings.

Active Directory Domain Services Group Policy in Windows Server provided you with more control over power management on client PCs. These capabilities are further enhanced in Windows Server and Windows 7 to provide even more precise control in more deployment scenarios for even greater potential savings.

Application Performance

Windows Server was the first Microsoft product platform to move to a 64-bit only model, and although you can run 32-bit applications on Windows Server, 64-bit applications will run significantly faster and handle larger compute loads than previous Windows Server platforms. Windows Server's network performance has much faster communication between servers, workstations, remote computing sites and users. New features include a completely redesigned TCP/IP stack, support for SMB 2.0 and making it easy for your IT administrators to enable IPv6 where appropriate.

Web Ready

Windows Server comes with Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7), a Web server and security-enhanced, easy-to-manage platform for developing and reliably hosting Web applications and services. Internet Information Server IIS7 together with the .NET Framework 3.0 provide a comprehensive platform for building applications that connect users and data, enabling them to visualize, share, and act on information. Additionally, IIS7 plays a central role in unifying Microsoft's Web platform technologies ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation Web services, and Windows SharePoint Services.

Failover Clustering

Server availability is a higher priority than ever. The demands of a “24x7” global marketplace means downtime can equate to lost customers, revenue, and productivity. Windows Server Failover Clustering is an important feature of the Windows Server platform that can help improve your server availability. Should one server fail, another server begins to provide service in its place. Failover clusters provide you with high availability for important databases, messaging servers, file and print services, and virtualized workloads. With failover clustering you can help build redundancy into your network and eliminate single points of failure.

SaintGroup Expertise

Our Windows Server consultants assist businesses in using servers to provide the infrastructure for IT operations, security, application development and integration and collaboration. We can assist you through the whole solution lifecycle from design through to purchasing hardware, implementation and support and can call upon our VMWare consultants if virtualisation is also being considered.

Furthermore, SaintGroup will help you consider the options of whether an on premise solution or a hosted solution in our Tier 3 Data Centre facility is right for your business, and our Managed Services team can proactively monitor the servers alerting you to potential issues before they become service impacting or offer a fully managed solution where SaintGroup fully administer the service on your behalf.