How do large enterprise cloud providers describe Windows-environments?

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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http://www.fujitsu.com/de/about/resources/news/press-releases/2016/2016-11-15-fujitsu-startet-k5-cloud-services-in-deutschland.html

Fujitsu's enterprise cloud server service comes to Germany. In the press article, they explain that all their servers are basically running OpenStack KVM by default, but that VMWare is also an option.

Funny is that they also mention that they can still guarantee retro-compatibility with "legacy Traditional IT" (herkömmlicher „ Traditioneller IT“), and thereby refer to "hybrid systems", meaning those that still use Windows-based systems.

That is the enterprise reality of a company that doesn't offer cloud services in the US lolz...

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For what it's worth, saw this video this morning and come to think of it.

After having talked about clustering and listed a number of linux distros and BSD this guy from 45 Drives says "Finally, in single machine operating systems, Windows server 2012 is solid as a rock... It'll work just great in these machines, you can get some great performance out of that... although there are some things you gotta do if you wish to use RAID arrays properly, but that's... somebody who use Microsoft understands that"

So it seems he thinks there are certain caveats to using it.

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The "enterprise" backend or backbone servers are typically going to be Unix based. It's the front end server work and user experience side where windows excels at.

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This is about cloud services, including SaaS deployments. They offer two products basically: typical cloud hosting and server hosting in various forms.
It's clear that the server world in *nix-only. This is about the entire IT environment of the customers enterprise, not about the cloud infrastructure. They use quotes and literally use the words "legacy traditional IT" to refer to enterprises that still use Windows at the front-end to guarantee retro-compatibility for... because they are the back-end.
Other than that, objective people that are not forced by Adobe or SAP or gaming software to actually use Windows, and that have tried a modern day Linux distribution, will never agree that Windows "excels" at anything over Linux lol...

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If only everyone was ultra hipster, then the nix would take over.

I have no hate on it. I use OpenSUSE and Kali regularly and love them both. I just have to deal with real people in a real environment and know for a fact that Windows will never be a "legacy" system for front end work in business'.

Never might be stong though. Lets say, foreseeable future. Particularly in medical. I could see unix taking over mom and pop shops, maybe POS based enterprises.

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Just pointing out how Fujitsu feels about that, as I said, because I thought it was funny. Everyone knows my opinion on the matter of Windows already, I'm not really going to debate it. As I said, Fujitsu does not offer cloud services in the US. They offer cloud services in Japan, Germany, the UK and South-Korea, and the servers for those services, are always positioned in the country where the services are offered. Outside of the US, this is a great marketing bonus, even a strict necessity.

Fujitsu is a very large company, that is famous for doing things right, for making incredible wise decisions. Fujitsu was traditionally a heavy industries company, like it still is today, comparable to Samsung if you will, with a lot of military contracts, a lot of super high end technology for military contracts, a lot of medical, etc... A very long time ago, the CEO of Fujitsu saw the necessity coming to have computers with CAD/CAM and whatever, and he started Fujitsu as an IT company, just for Fujitsu to be able to make it's own computers and always be independent as far as IT goes. The rest is history pretty much.

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That may also be due to reduced trust in the US's spying and laws on data collection. My speculation is that they could be using this as leverage to increase sales and play on the reduction in trust against the USA, and by proxy, Microsoft since previous laws have stated that MS must turn over data on servers even outside the US. It's funny this comes at the same time MS starts supporting Unix though.

I know none of those countries listed are poor (maybe SK could be on the poor-er side), but this could be directed towards poorer countries as well. Depending on how they run it, the services could be cheaper using their own baked out distribution and create a cost premium for 3rd party software (as stated VMWare, MS windows, Redhat etc.)

Honestly, I've only seen Fujitsu in business as a photocopier, and particularly, scanner company. I had no idea they had endeavors like this until you posted it.

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Thanks for posting the link up, interesting read and relevant to many things I am working on at the moment.

This;

however is not what they are talking about when they are refering to legacy systems; at least they are not specifically talking about Windows. Legacy systems could be anything. It could even be an app written fairly recently in Java and hosted on RHEL.

Legacy systems are just generally the systems that are no longer under active development and a company has no desire to go through another development cycle to move them to a new platform, they are operationally supported and might still recieve some bug-fixies but that is pretty much it. Sometimes however, a business decides that managing their own data-centre and hardware is no longer ciost effective and they want to migrate everything to a fully virtualised private cloud, a public cloud, or maybe into PaaS solution. If there is a need to some can easily be migrated and others not. Hence the need to maybe keep some where they are until they are ready to be switched off and set up a hybrid solution in the interim.

Where I work 'legacy' systems are a problem, they includes thousands of servers, running all sorts of Unix, Linux and Windows Operating Systems, many with proprietary database engines (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) and many proprietary applications - SAP and stuff written in all sorts of langauges that we don't necessarily have source code for (it's a mess thanks to years of out-sourcing, which is now changing)

Sometimes, these are easy to re-platform - I can do a Physical to Virtual migration and shove the virttualised server into Azure, Softlayer, or an on-prem private cloud. It's still a legacy app, but now nested inside a modern platform with modern hardware. I can forget about it for a while...

Then there are applications that are not legacy and the business want to move them to a cloud platform for global scale-out - but the logistics of doing so are not easy. Maybe the application developers were lazy and assumed that the application database would always be on the same server as the application so wrote a chatty application that cannot tollerate much network latency. Maybe their chioce of database and decision to write a stateful web app means it's going to be a pig to scale-it-out without a serious re-write. Suddenly this application is now considered legacy as its more efficient to start from scratch top re-write it to use all Azure PaaS services, or maybe to sit it inside Docker containers and so on.

The term legacy is very subjective and can be applied to any application stack/language/operating system. Nice try to use it in another effort to show how irrelevant Windows can now be :-)

If I really wanted to (and I would really need to want to, because it might not make much sense) I could build an entirely modern infrastructure platform - a private cloud. That would run 100% Open Source applications inside Linux VM's using Linux hosted containers and yet use Microsoft owned software for 100% of the Private Cloud infrastructure. I could also deploy the same applications into Azure, and link the two to have hybrid cloud/on-prem deployments. Which is actually pretty cool - but use the new German Azure datacenters, because Microsoft doesn't own them and the US Government cannot force data disclosure ;-)

My Hipster developers would not care - they only see Linux & Open Source at their layer. My 'legacy' Windows Admins who (are arguably brain-washed) look after the infrasture and haven't had time or inclination to learn about Linux and Open-Source will also be happy....

This is now my life. I work for one of the biggest European based global corporations (inside top 100 for EU). Recently we (IT services) have made the case that Open-Source is the future. The leadership have bought into this and enthusastically aprroved. We are also a big Microsoft customer, and this won't change... it's still a good partnership - for us.

[EDIT - Apologies for spelling/grammer errors, there are probably quite a few]