Announcing Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials!

Guten Morgen from Germany! Joel Garcia blogging from TechEd Berlin, where we are announcing and showing off Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, the newest member of the Storage Server product family. The Windows Storage Server Blog lives here.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is part of the Windows Storage Server family, which is built upon the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system to provide a platform for network attached storage appliances. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials includes storage technologies enabling you to grow with your storage requirements while providing an easy to use backup and recovery solution. Windows Storage Server Essentials is specifically developed to address the storage needs for small businesses up to 25 users without the need for specialized IT skills. Configuring Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is easy: remove from box, connect to network, power up and access the device from a browser to configure it. The management dashboard makes it simple to manage, maintain and monitor the health of the Windows Storage Server Essentials device, and client computers.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials as well as the rest of the Storage Server product family are available through hardware partners.

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can be used as a new server for storage or to add additional storage capacity. For information on this please look at the SBS Blog.

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Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials addresses the requirements of small businesses with the following features:

Easy to use Backup and Recovery

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials helps protect business data by providing daily automatic and consolidated backup for your PCs, as well as Mac clients. Specialized IT skills are not required to manage the small business storage backup and recovery requirements. Users can easily perform recovery on individual files, folders, entire client PC or even the entire Windows Storage Server Essentials device.

Active Directory Domain Join

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can easily integrate into the Microsoft identity infrastructure and that ensures that there is secure access for all the important small business data. This is done easily and through the management dashboard.

Management Dashboard

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials provides a dashboard that helps manage, maintain and monitor the health of the server, and client computers. Organizations can provision users, file shares and administer 3rd party add-ins without the need for specialized IT skills.

Centralized Storage

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials provides storage to keep all your important documents in one place. Every member of the organization can access what they need in one centralized place from their PCs securely.

Plug and Play Storage and File Services

As a preconfigured appliance Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is ready-to-go right out of the box. File services are pre-configured and deployment is quick and painless, just plug in power and Ethernet, then complete the simple setup from a client computer and you are done.

Remote Web Access

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials lets small business users access their data securely from any common browser from almost any device. This will ensure that even when users are away from their business network that they have access to their important data.

Add-ins

Leverage the community of add-ins that help extend the storage and file capabilities of the Windows Storage Server Essentials device in the areas of management, data protection, and monitoring.

To see further information on how this release integrates in Microsoft’s SMB solution portfolio, please refer to today’s SBS Blog.