Getting Started with Technical Drill Downs for the New Windows Server, SQL Server and System Center Previews

We hope everyone is enjoying TechEd Europe 2013 and the host city of Madrid, Spain.  It’s a beautiful city with a rich history. We’re trying to write some history of our own this year at both TechEd conferences. There are some amazing advances coming from the Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Intune product teams.  In addition to the great sessions being delivered at TechEd Europe 2013, there are some new technical posts we think you’ll find valuable.

As we usually do, we’ll start with Windows Server. It is the foundation OS for many of our products and it is important to know what we are delivering with the next release. The file system and storage capabilities have been an important role for all server operating systems, and that continues today with virtualization and cloud services.  See the Windows Server teams blog post, “Storage Transformation for Your Datacenter” for information on SMB Direct, SMB Multichannel and other storage improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2.

While we are talking about management, the Intune and System Center teams have penned a post called, “Preview New People-centric IT Products Now!”  In that post you get information on the device operating systems we support, what you can test today, and what is coming in the next release of Windows Intune (not yet available for testing).

And last but not least is SQL Server 2014.  The SQL Server product group kicked off a series of blogs today on SQL Server 2014 In-Memory Technologies. In-memory OLTP (previously called Project Codename 'Hekaton')  is a new database engine optimized for memory resident data and OLTP workloads. In-memory OLTP is fully integrated into SQL Server – not a separate system. To take advantage of In-memory OLTP, a user defines a heavily accessed table as memory optimized. In-memory OLTP tables are fully transactional, durable and accessed using T-SQL in the same way as regular SQL Server tables.  The SQL Server team will be publishing a series of blog posts on In-Memory OLTP and here is the “SQL Server 2014 In Memory Technologies: Blog Series Introduction" to start.

Content and Downloads

If the information in the blog posts seems foreign and you want to learn more, be sure to check out all of the sessions in the TechEd Europe 2013 course catalog.  You can watch the sessions live or on-demand.  The sessions are organized by tracks and you can filter in a variety of ways to find a particular topic.

Ready to try the previews for yourself?  Go get the Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 or SQL Server 2014 R2 previews at the download center.  Enjoy!