Vaulted data center tests Windows Server 2008

Computerworld Australia - For one local IT services company, an unused bank vault became the ideal secure site for a new data center to enter the hosting market.

Australia-based Networking Plus Pty. moved into an old Commonwealth Bank of Australia branch. It converted a large vault into a modern data center with overhead cabling and fully redundant air conditioning.

Infrastructure manager Robert Warren said Networking Plus moved into hosting when the new data center went live in July 2007. "It's certainly secure, as the door takes two people to move," Warren said. The power service is also top-notch, since the building shares the same grid as an adjacent hospital, he said.

The vault-based data center houses about 35 servers, most of which run Windows Server 2003 and some of which run Red Hat Linux. To expand its hosting business, Networking Plus became an early adopter of Windows Server 2008 and is now testing four servers.

So far, Warren said he is "very impressed" by the small memory footprint that Windows Server 2008 requires to host Web sites. "The memory handling is extremely improved over 2003, and we'll be able to run more Web sites per server," he said, adding that FastCGI support will also allow more clients to be consolidated onto single machines.

A lot of Networking Plus customer sites were developed in ASP.Net, and Warren described it as a "no-brainer" to upgrade them to Windows Server 2008 because of the integration with Internet Information Server 7 and the ability to integrate third-party modules into IIS7.

Also, he said, "there is some great technology that will allow you to diagnose and troubleshoot servers -- [and] Server 2008 pinpoints errors a lot easier."

Warren is investigating Windows Server 2008's virtualization technology to offer a server appliance that customers can deploy on-site yet be managed centrally.

"The single biggest change in Windows Server 2008 is [performance]," said Martin Gregory, Microsoft Australia's director of server and tools, with FastCGI able to serve 6,000 pages per second. "We've been collaborating with Zen Technologies to optimize PHP for running on Windows," he said.

Windows Server 2008 is due for local release at the end of February.