The end-of-life for MS SQL Server 2005 is just six months away

Software behemoth Microsoft is once again warning system admins that the end-of-life (EoL) date for its MS SQL Server 2005 is now just six months away.

The company sent out yesterday a reminder to customers that its ten-year-old database server edition will officially be considered out of support on April 12, 2016.

This simply means that SQL Server 2005 systems will no longer be able to receive free security updates from Microsoft after that date.

While extended support can be had at a specific cost, Microsoft would rather customers simply update from SQL Server 2005 to its most recent MS SQL Server 2014.

In sounding off the six month alarm, Microsoft made its sales pitch for upgrading to SQL Server 2014. Nothing new there.

Among the promised benefits of migrating from 2005 to 2014 are improved performance, better uptime stability, and better integration with Excel and Power BI.

Additionally, and this is where it really counts for the software giant, it also means nice new license revenues for Microsoft. That's several millions of new dollars in newly minted cash.

"In short, MS SQL Server 2014 delivers a high-performing, advanced data platform that keeps up with modern business needs," wrote Microsoft corporate vice president of enterprise marketing Takeshi Numoto.

Microsoft has long been warning enterprise customers of the looming end-of-life for SQL Server 2005, and trying to sell them on an upgrade to SQL Server 2014 in the process.

Back in April of this year when the one-year notice was posted, Microsoft made a similar announcement touting the virtues of the new 2014 edition.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft moved the upcoming SQL Server 2016 into its public preview trials. Its new SQL Server 2016 touts improved data security and this time, better integration with Azure, the company claims.

Source: Microsoft.

Big snafu crashes Google's main container engine, twice

A few days ago there was a big screwup that crashed Google's main container engine.

On Friday afternoon, users had trouble connecting to the metadata server. That's the error message they were getting.

And the issue continued for quite a while. Then a string of updates over Friday night and Saturday morning (Pacific Time) explain how Google identified the problem.

The company crafted a fix, implemented it and then declared that the issue "should have been resolved for all affected clusters” as of 10:45 Pacific Time on October 25.

Note the “should have” because at 21:30 on the same day Google had to admit that “We have identified a small number of additional Google Container Engine clusters that were not fixed by the previous round of repair.”

To reconstruct this timeline, on Friday afternoon, Google had a problem. By the next day, it declared it had restored normal service. But it hadn't and some people lost a large chunk of their Saturday night cleaning up a corner of the Google cloud that someone didn't fix properly the first time.

Sounds familiar? Google's last cloud glitch was about five weeks before this new incident. That's a more-than-decent record even if the fix for this fail didn't work the first time.

Source: Google.

Get ready to hear the new codeword 'Composable Infrastructure'

It looks like people in the IT community better need to get ready to see the keyword 'Composable Infrastructure' since it looks like some companies are getting ready to blast the industry with that term.

The good news is that while *it is* marketing jargon, behind the new term are some advances in server design that will hopefully improve server virtualization and private clouds.

The new keyword has its roots in server virtualization, which is of course an eminently sensible concept that anyone sensible uses whenever possible.

Intel and AMD both gave server virtualization a good jolt forward with their respective virtualization extensions that equipped their CPUs with the smarts to help multiple virtual machines to do their thing all at once.

Overall, servers have changed shape and components in the years since server virtualization was born. But today they're changing more profoundly.

Take for example the M-series of Cisco's UCS servers, which offer shared storage, networking, cooling and power to so-called cartridges that contain RAM and CPU.

Cisco's concept is that instead of having blade servers with dedicated resources, the M-series allows users to assemble components into servers with their preferred configurations, with less overhead than is required to operate virtual machines that span different boxes or touch a SAN for resources.

In a composable infrastructure world, APIs make it possible for code to whip up the servers it wants. That's important, because composable infrastructure is seen as a bridge between server virtualisation and the software-defined (SDN) data centre.

The reasoning is that infrastructure that allows itself to be configured gives software more to define, which is probably a good thing.

Cisco's Todd Brannon, director of product marketing for unified computing, calls the composable infrastructure approach “physicalisation”, because it's about defining a physical server rather than creating virtual servers.

And Cisco isn't alone in its ambitions. For its part, HP has also announced it plans to get into the composable ecosystem and will also use the “composable infrastructure” moniker.

But as you can readily expect, this isn't a closed loop-- Intel and IBM have also expressed similar ideas even if they're not sharing the jargon, at least not yet.

Other IT firms also think that the composable concept has some potential in embedded applications. Today a car contains many computers. A computer capable of being re-composed has the potential to reduce the bill of materials by assembling itself configurations most useful at the time they are required.

While on the road, resources are dedicated to staying there safely. When undergoing maintenance, the computer would re-compose itself to do diagnostics. Same outcomes, fewer parts. You get the idea.

Composable infrastructure looks like it is going to be real and the term has a decent chance of becoming popular, much like so many other technical terms of the IT industry. Time will tell, but for now at least, we'll be watching this closely.

Source: Cisco.