Microsoft's New Concierge-Like Support Services 

Microsoft recently launched a high-end concierge-like Premium Support add-on service - Premier Mission Critical Support - that offers guaranteed 30-minute response times and round the clock service for mission critical solutions. Microsoft claims to offer, as part of the package, dedicated service professionals that are familiar with your organization and your Microsoft software and hardware, resulting in faster response time.

Premier Mission Critical support offers a 24/7 dedicated phone line for each individual company. If Microsoft fails to respond within the 30-minute time allotment, financial credits are given to your company. Aimed at large enterprises that license their server and database products, the price tag generally ranges from $200,000 to a whopping $1 million annually, according to a recent PC World article.

According to Gartner, since 2005, unplanned downtime for mission-critical applications has increased by more than 50 percent in organizations with fewer than 2,500 users and almost 70 percent for organizations with more than 2,500 users. Disaster recovery is certainly an important issue for all organizations, large or small, and when something goes awry, it's vital to have someone on the other end of the phone that knows who you are and why the particular issue is so important to your business functions.

On the other hand, most large organizations have applications running on Microsoft products that are either developed in-house or customized to their own business needs - can Microsoft support those? Or the question should be -will they?

Windows Server Virtualization Calculators

Virtualization is confusing, no matter who you are. Something that might save you time and a lot of head scratching is Microsoft's two Virtualization calculators - click here to start using calculators.

The calculators provide two ways to estimate the amount and cost of licenses needed for Windows Server Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition for your virtualization scenarios.

• Calculator 1 is designed to estimate the licenses and cost of Windows Server by editions and numerous Microsoft server products on a single, physical server.
• Calculator 2 is designed to estimate the licenses and cost of only Windows Server -by edition- for one or multiple physical servers.

While this and other automated resources can give you a sense of how many licenses you need, these tools shouldn't be solely relied upon, owing in part to the uniqueness of each corporate environment.