Containers Eliminate Modernization Pain And Open New Value-Add Opportunities
By Edwin Sarmiento, SQL Server MVP & MCM and Carl Berglund, Director of Products, DH2i
End-of-life (EOL) announcements for Windows Server and SQL Server are a fact of life for your clients. These dreaded notifications signal yet another long, expensive, and painful migration process that businesses have been forced to accept as a required element of data center modernization. What makes this process especially onerous is how today’s physical and virtualized deployments lock all three data center elements—application, operating system, and infrastructure — into a single entity, with each element demanding lifecycle support at huge burdened cost. But new container technologies offer enormous promise for VARs and integrators to help clients modernize their data center while opening up wallet-share for innovative, value-added offerings.
Containers In The Mission-Critical Data Center
Maybe you’ve assumed containers don’t apply to Windows-based data centers — at least, not yet. After all, most of the buzz about containers so far has focused on stateless, Linux-based application development and deployment where containers provide operating system (OS) virtualization but require a separate container for every OS distribution that the application needs to run on. But in the Windows world, multiple OS distributions aren’t an issue. That means Windows containers can take the abstraction higher to application virtualization, which allows seamless application stop-start across multiple generations of operating systems and infrastructure. By decoupling the application from the underlying OS and server infrastructure, containers allow each element to be updated with minimal risk and effort, while maintaining application high availability and data tier portability and easing overall orchestration and management.
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