Today, the Small Business Server engineering team signed off the release of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials! Check out all of the cool capabilities on the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 announcement blog. This exciting milestone means OEM partners can now use Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials (WSS Essentials) to build NAS appliances…

Acer comes to market with a strong storage offering of a 2U server that delivers 3.5" hot-pluggable SAS or SATA HDDs, up to 12TB SATA or 5.4TB SAS configurations running with a pair of Xeon E5620 processors. This Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 –based appliance features an LSI MegaRAID 9260-16i with 16-internal ports, supporting RAID…

Checkout the PC-Pro review that just came out for the latest StorageWorks X1500, which is a Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 appliance. See the entire review here:    HP StorageWorks X1500 G2 4TB review This is another great HP offering bringing unified storage solutions for SMBs. The article highlights some of the capabilities that really make…

The Microsoft OEM Engineering Services team has some valuable services that Windows Storage Server partners can leverage to help design, deliver and support embedded storage solutions. Getting access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM) can really impact the success of a product. TAMs can escalate issues through the highest levels of Microsoft. TAMs can dig…

Claus Joergensen, one of the founding fathers of Windows Storage Server, had a great post today about a new white paper, available here, discussing the best practices and guidance for sizing NTFS volumes. The paper also has details on self-healing NTFS and Chkdsk execution times on Windows Server 2008 R2. When planning Windows file server…

I Windows Storage Server!!  Happy (belated) Valentine’s day!  It’s a day late, but here is a little love for all the people in the field that need to solve storage problems. A new whitepaper is now available that will answer a ton of questions about Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 and the new iSCSI Software…

If you are using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to manage and monitor your servers, you can now load the new management pack for the iSCSI Software Target and Single Instance Storage (SIS). Both of these storage components are key contributors to the new Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 platform. The Windows Storage Server Management…

The momentum for Windows Storage Server is growing! Take the awesome network storage and branch office features in the OS and when they are combined with hardware, software and services available from top manufacturers, they create high-performance storage solutions. Checkout the latest release from Xiotech, these guys make some sweet storage blades called the Intelligent…

Check out the new iSCSI migration guide that was just posted on TechNet under the “Planning and Deployment” section of the iSCSI Software Target 3.3 Technical Library.   This is located in the TechNet tree-view here: If you have iSCSI Targets and LUNs already configured on Windows Storage Server 2008 or 2008 R2 and want to…

Check out the latest Windows Storage Server 2008 R2-based appliances from Starline computer GmbH!  These systems look like they can really rock some storage with 10Gbit Ethernet and 6Gbit SAS. See the new datasheet for the NDL-3000RW. I love the product family name “NAS Deluxe”. Hard to believe they have all those features for a…