When businesses hear that “end of support” is approaching for one of their core business systems, it often evokes fear – and a frantic scramble in the IT department to implement a quick fix.
On July 12, 2022, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 will reach its end of service – and will reach end of life on July 8, 2025. But fortunately, modernizing your SQL server workloads may be easier than you think!
Understanding your options
If you are unable to move off of SQL Server before July 12 of this year, there is no cause for alarm. Extended security update options are available from Microsoft until July 8, 2025 (though the cost does increase exponentially as time goes on). Here are the details:
- If you are running SQL Server 2012 in Azure, you will receive extended security updates for free
- If you are running SQL Server 2012 on-premises, you can purchase extended security updates for the first year at 75% of the license cost
- For the second year it will cost 100% of the license cost to extend the security updates
- The third year will cost 125% of the license cost to extend security updates
Extending your security updates is a viable option, albeit an expensive one. However, you can also modernize and migrate your SQL Server workloads from any version 2005 or newer with Carbonite™ Migrate.
What makes our solution stand out?
Modernizing and migrating SQL Server is just one of the many reasons why a company might want to migrate its data: mergers, hardware upgrades or moves to the cloud are other common motivations. But unfortunately, data migrations often entail downtime, data loss, operational disruption or compatibility issues.
Carbonite Migrate alleviates these concerns and simplifies the migration process. We provide real-time, byte-level replication and orchestration to help businesses migrate complete workloads seamlessly. We can migrate data and systems to, from or between any combination of physical, virtual and cloud-based platforms for enhanced agility with little to no downtime.
For SQL Server modernization, we can migrate and upgrade your workload in a single motion. The production source can be a lower version of SQL Server which is then upgraded to a newer production version. For instance, a SQL Server 2012 running Windows Server 2012 R2 can be moved to a higher version of Windows anywhere – such as a SQL Server 2019 running on Windows Server 2019 in the Azure Cloud. To dive into more details on how our modernization process works, check out our technical solutions guide.
Reaping all the benefits
There are multiple benefits to using Carbonite Migrate to modernize and migrate your SQL Server. First and foremost, it helps you easily move data off of old, outdated technology. In addition, it allows you to achieve this with near-zero downtime. This enables your business to remain productive even when you are performing large migrations.
Beyond this, migration can help you reduce infrastructure costs so that you don’t spend more than you need to. For example, Carbonite Migrate’s granular data selection lets you avoid migrating unnecessary archived data to ensure that you aren’t storing cold data in more costly “hot” environments.
Lastly, our automation and orchestration in every stage of the process provides a turnkey migration process to help you and your team focus on other revenue-generating activities. To learn more about our SQL Server modernization process, download a copy of our technical solutions guide or talk to one of our experts.
