[citation][nom]jhansonxi[/nom]Hard to believe but I still encounter companies running web servers on Win2K. I don't know if it is management ignorance or just lack of IT staff to replace it.[/citation]
Usually it's a little more complicated than that. Most (admittedly not all) IT departments aren't stupid and are more than willing and able to upgrade the server operating systems, but money and "what, this weekend? No, you cannot take down the server this weekend!" responses from managing partners for the firm makes it difficult sometimes (seriously, we had to delay upgrading our Internet lines TWELVE WEEKS because of crap like that).
We're still running Windows 2000 Server on three servers in our company because those servers are 5 years old or older. While possible, the hardware on our old servers are, well...old--all but one of them meet the minimum requirements to run Server 2008, but the performance disadvantages would outweigh the feature advantages of upgrading.
So...why haven't we just replaced the old servers? Primary reason: money. We've gone through several proposals to management over the past couple of years (when I started working here), all turned down (money), but we finally got approval to purchase one server first quarter next year. Fortunately, it will be able to replace two of our old servers, and the other one that is almost exactly 5 years old will have to be upgraded to Server 2003 for us to continue past July.
We in IT would love to be able to wave a magic wand and get the exact server hardware and software configurations we want, but with the money we are alloted for projects, we must make due with what we get. Fortunately, we can finally upgrade our ancient Windows 2000 domain with Exchange 2003 over to Windows Server 2008 (R2) domain using Exchange 2010. We'll just have to live with our secondary DC running on a five-year-old server that runs Windows Server 2003 for a while, but it's still better than a six year old server running Windows 2000.