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. However, it doesn’t need to be this way!  

Windows SQL Server 2016 will reach the end of its extended support on July 14, 2026. While this date may seem like it is far away, now is the perfect time to assess your environments, plan your budget and allocate the resources needed to modernize these servers.   

Why modernize or migrate your SQL Server  

Modernizing and migrating SQL Server from an old, unsupported version is just one of the many reasons why a company might want to migrate its data. Many businesses choose to migrate their data with company mergers, hardware upgrades or moves to the cloud.  But unfortunately, data migrations often entail downtime, data loss, operational disruption or compatibility issues. 

OpenText 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.  

Reaping all the benefits 

There are multiple benefits to using OpenText 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 First and foremost, it helps you easily move data off of old, outdated technology.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, OpenText 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, watch our recent webinar replay to see how we can make this process seamless for your business.