Cloud Adoption Driver? Windows 2003

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Many customers ask me what is driving Cloud adoption. When you look around the trade blogs tell you Capex shortages, applications, mobile, big data, etc are driving cloud adoption. While these factors are driving much of cloud adoption, especially from the developer community, we are also seeing the expiration of Windows 2003 support also driving IT groups to look heavily into cloud.

Yes, the now 11-year-old operating system is driving IT orgs to move to the cloud. Windows 2003 was launched when my now 19-year-old son who is in the military was playing with his Legos in 3 grade… Why? Many of our customers are still running physical servers which are aging, or they have already virtualized but the gear VMWARE is running on is also aging and the versions of VMWARE are also ending EOS. If you can send a copy of the server to the cloud, build another Windows 2008 or 2012 server alongside you can test that application which was written in-house and long since forgotten without much expense. As there is no direct upgrade path from Windows 2003, you have to do a migration. It tends to be much easier for an IT staff to spend a few bucks in the cloud than it is to stand up a new VMWARE farm, upgrade the VMDK files, build new OSs and get the approval to spend money in-house. The risk is much lower in the cloud.

Do all applications work in the cloud? Depends…do all these aging applications work on a new OS? Some do and some don’t. So another good testing ground in the cloud is Citrix or Microsoft Application Packaging and streaming of old applications. For many organizations, Citrix is a place for old, poorly written applications to die. They package the app in the OS that they were written for, and sit it in the cloud on Windows 2012. Application Virtualization holds the promise that virtualization is all about, reducing applications down to simply consuming CPU/RAM/Disk. Cloud is giving customers the opportunity to test their processes with little to no risk of migrating applications to new more secure Operating systems.

So, is this easy? No. I suggest determining a repeatable process that includes everything from the technical part of migrating, to updating your ITIL processes including financials. While at GE, I worked as a consultant for their Rationalization and Obsolescence team. This team was in charge of migrating applications and data from old servers, to new servers. Back then we migrated old Unix and Windows-based servers to new hardware. The processes I developed had to incorporate different workgroups (usually contracting companies), technical areas (Servers, DC, Storage, Networking, Accounting, etc), needed automation so was built into the ITIL CMBD and discovery tools, and needed reporting mechanisms back to the business units as they had footed the bill. IT billback drove everything at GE and if you couldn’t document how you were saving them money…you didn’t get it done.

In all there was a possibility of 67 individual steps in the Rationalization process, but upfront after discovery those steps were whittled down. If you were simply getting rid of old hardware that already was off you had about 9 steps. If you had a server with multiple applications, SAN connections and you needed to upgrade to a new OS…you had many more steps.

The process ran as such:

1. Create a project that has funding for a server or servers.
2. Run discovery on the assets. Are they on? What is on them? What is the attributes (Windows/Linux/SAN attached/etc).
3. Fill out the info you learned into the workflow, it will build the Change Requests and the WO steps including who has to do the work.
4. If you are replacing, you follow the build process.
5. Allow the application team to test on the new platform. Make them sign off.
6. Migrate. This is the most intensive part, but if you did everything above correctly…you are fine. Again, make the application team sign off that all is working.
7. Ice the sever(s) and wait.
8. Decom the server(s) and return all related assets back into inventory (HBAs, network ports, licenses, rack space and power)
9. Dispose of the assets. Get them off the books in accounting and process any regulatory procedures like wiping disks and disposal.

In all, once these processes were defined and automated my team of 5 technical PMs went from replacing 150 machines per year on average to over 1600. We also could easily bring in less technical PMs to do the low-level work. The processes were even modified for Virtualization which was adopted during that time. DevOps can feed into these processes and will dramatically increase your productivity as well. In all, we achieved a repeatable process that increased yield, and we developed reporting mechanisms back to business CIOs. We reported which Applications teams were helping us migrate the fastest and who wasn’t, SLAs and total costs. CMDB info was improved due to discovery, automation, using monitoring tools, and the repeatable process including naming conventions. And of course, the accounting team was happy b/c we took thousands of assets off the books which they had been paying tax on and saving of expensive DC space.

Ultimately, we also began combining similar servers and services. Web servers were consolidated into farms, file/print was consolidated onto cheap NAS storage, DNS, AD, and other services were consolidated and we even gave data to the WAN Optimization team to pull back services easily handled by the network. In all, a small investment in consulting and programming saved GE $12.7 in hardware and double that in maintenance alone over a 2 year period.

So, as you look at your inventory of aging Operating systems ask how you can move them to the cloud and how you can migrate those applications.

Now what I have written above is the basics. Each company will have nearly identical steps, but each will need to be customized based upon your working groups. If you want to know more, contact me @davespiess on Twitter or find me on LinkedIn, uk.linkedin.com/in/davespiess/.

Or my blogs:

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