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from the does-that-include-emotional-support dept.
Microsoft has announced a new "Premium Assurance" plan for Windows Server and SQL Server.
Redmond currently offers five years of Mainstream Support on the aforementioned products, during which new features are added and updates are made for reasons of security or just to fix things up. Next comes five years of extended support, during which the security fixes and functionality tweaks keep flowing.
The new support offering will see bugs rated "critical" or "important" patched for the six-year duration of the Premium Assurance plan.
The outcome of the new plan is that operating systems like Windows Server 2008 R2 will now be supported until the year 2026. SQL Server 2008 can now be supported until 2025.
Microsoft's billing Premium Assurance as a comfort to those running applications that may not be easy to evaporate into a cloud. By offering extended support, Redmond reckons, you can just keep them running without worrying about migration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @12:38PM
Microsoft is just acknowledging a) that Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2 are good enough for a significant slice of workloads and, much more importantly to them, b) these workloads would be transitioned to Postgres or MySQL rather than upgraded to SQL 2016 or Server 2016.
Microsoft decided that they would rather take the support money than force an upgrade. From a financial and business point of view, it makes a lot of sense.
1) They keep their customer on Windows
2) The customer keeps paying SA for an additional 6 years beyond when 2008 R2 would have been EOL
3) The customer pays an additional fee that Microsoft uses to keep the 2008 R2 group running
For Microsoft, this is a win.
I have a sneaking suspicion this will be used to keep a lot of RDS farms on 2008R2.