Windows Server Takes Center Stage at WinHEC 2008

This morning Bill Laing, corporate vice president, Windows Server and Solutions Division, updated over 1,500 WinHEC 2008 attendees on customer reception of the current Windows Server operating system in addition to elaborating on some of the improvements incorporated into Windows Server 2008 R2 (previously code named “Windows Server 7”). New features within Windows Server 2008 R2 include:

· Live Migration –Allows customer to move virtual machines from one host to another in less than two seconds with no loss of performance. This facilitates hardware maintenance and upgrades, manual failover, and the consolidation of workloads on fewer servers.

· Direct Access – Customers can connect to a work environment as if they were on the corporate LAN, while enabling IT to fully manage remote PCs as if they were on premise. Users benefit from consistent and complete access to corporate resources, while IT is able to manage all connected machines in a unified way, with fewer security risks.

· Branch Cache – Customers can greatly reduce Wide Area Network (WAN) bandwidth consumption between the datacenter and branch office and improve application responsiveness by inventorying all files requested by client PCs in a branch.

· Scalability – Support for greater than 64 processor cores allows customers to scale-up to more fully exploit today’s powerful CPUs and only deploy the features they choose and scale those solutions to meet their organization needs.

For more information on Bill’s conversations at WinHEC, check out his PressPass Q&A.

Other resources online via the following sites:

- Virtual Press Room (https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/winhec/default.mspx)

- Windows Server Team Blog (https://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/).