As a member of Microsoft’s rapid deployment programme, the John Lewis Partnership has been piloting Windows Server 2008 during the past few months.

The company has already upgraded some of its core domain servers and is looking to use the operating system to consolidate 2,000 servers in its retail outlets over the coming year.

The Partnership operates 27 department stores across the UK, as well as 187 Waitrose supermarkets and the Greenbee.com direct services company, with about 2,000 servers in use across the company.

Crispin Hobbs, John Lewis Partnership PC infrastructure and systems manager, says one of his highest priorities for the coming year is to consolidate servers to reduce costs and support the Partnership’s green strategy.

Hobbs is aiming to replace two servers in each branch with a single multifunctional system.

Previously, with Windows Server 2003, the domain server had to be a dedicated machine for security reasons. But with the read-only domain controller (RODC) included in Windows Server 2008 providing greater security and manageability, the domain server can now run other applications simultaneously.

“The domain controller with Windows Server 2003 had to have lock-down functions, and in our opinion needed a dedicated server. Now we can put print functions and DNS on the same server and not be scared of breaking it,” says Hobbs.

“We are also keen to look at clustering with Windows Server 2008 later in the year, and examine how it can improve our auditing as well. There are so many new features in the operating system that we have not had time to get our heads around them and work out how best to exploit them yet.”

Though John Lewis is looking forward to seeing Hyper-V when it appears, the company is already
running 200 virtualised servers on VMware virtual infrastructure.

“We have been using VMware server virtualisation for about a year ­ – though we welcome Microsoft coming into the market with a strong virtualisation proposition, we had to get going with virtualisation and it has been very successful,” says Hobbs.

John Lewis is also evaluating application virtualisation, particularly Microsoft’s SoftGrid product, a technology that runs applications more securely and with fewer system conflicts on a central server but displays them on lower-cost thin-client desktop computers.

“We are very interested in SoftGrid, but the only way we can buy it is by buying desktop software assurance and we do not want everything in that package,” says Hobbs.

“We have had a good experience with licensing on Windows Server 2008, so we know how flexible Microsoft can be ­ we would like to see it being a little bit more flexible in the way it is packaging SoftGrid.”