Microsoft announces 16 years of support for Windows, SQL Servers

New ‘Premium Assurance’ plan extends support by six years, means Windows Server 2008 R2 will live until 2026.

Current Redmond offers around 5 years of mainstream support to the above products. During this time updates are made for security reasons and new features are added. Afterwards comes 5 years of extended support, through this time frame security fixes take place along with improvements to performance on a continual basis.

The new support will see bugs being rated “critical” or “important”, they will be patched through the period of the Premium Assurance plan.

The result of the new plan will see operating systems like Windows Server 2008 R2 being supported until 2026 and SQL Server 2008 will now be support until 2025.

Microsoft is billing Premium Assurance as a comforting offering to those who run applications that may not be easy to merge into the cloud. Redmond think that by offering extended support you can keep them running without the worry of migration.

Premium Assurance will be on sale early in 2017. Pricing suggests Microsoft would like to you purchase this product sooner rather than later: if you sign between March and June 2017, it will cost you five per cent of your current licence costs. Delay until July 2019 and that figure rises to 12 per cent. A datasheet (PDF) explains the costs in detail.

One last thing: the post announcing Premium Assurance includes the following nuggetoid of information:

“The next version of Windows Server is currently in planning, and will further advance the Windows Server 2016 capabilities around hybrid cloud, multi-layered security, containers, Nano Server, and software-defined data center technology.

It does not explain if this is reference to a second edition for Windows Server 2016 or a full release. This does however assures us that Microsoft is innovating more on-premise operation systems even with the age of Cloud that we are in.