Windows Server 2012 Released and Showcased by Microsoft

Microsoft today announced the release of Windows Server 2012 as part of a launch event.

The launch event consisted of a four-part Webcast, featuring Microsoft executives and demos, signaling the general availability of Microsoft's newest server. Satya Nadella, president of Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, led the first segment of the Webcast, providing the company's overall vision. He noted that the general availability of Windows Server 2012, launched after four years of development, had ushered in the era of the cloud operating system. Microsoft has broadened access to the cloud with its development of both Windows Azure and Windows Server. This cloud-based world will support multiple connected devices, as well as an explosion of data and the growing need to deliver continuous services, he contended.

Hardware products running Windows Server 2012 now can be purchased from Microsoft's OEM partners, including Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC. There are four editions of Windows Server: Datacenter, Standard, Essentials and Foundation. The Essentials edition is the one edition that's not expected to be available today. Microsoft expects it to be generally available by the end of this year.

Microsoft narrowed the licensing of Windows Server 2012 to just two editions, Datacenter and Standard. The two editions are the same except that Datacenter affords "unlimited" virtualization rights (subject to hardware limitations), while the Standard edition allows running as many as two virtual machines per license.

Virtualization and Storage Benefits

Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, emphasized the scalability of Windows Server 2012, adding that it can virtualize more than 90 percent of all SQL databases. He announced a new statistic for Windows Server 2012 -- that it is capable of running 8,000 virtual machines per cluster, which Laing called "the largest in the industry." He also highlighted the software defined networking aspects of the server, saying that it helps isolate workloads on shared infrastructure. Laing talked briefly about the storage options, including the use of "storage spaces," which lets users leverage industry-standard hardware to create pools of storage. The storage spaces feature lets users swap out disks and scale storage on the fly.

Jeff Woolsey, a principal program manager for Windows Server and Cloud at Microsoft, said that Windows Server 2012 supports up to 320 logical processors per server, up to 4 terabytes of memory per server and up to 64 TB per virtual disk. He also described the improved Hyper-V "live migration" feature of Windows Server 2012, which allows IP portability across subnets. He demonstrated the live migration of a virtual machine from Seattle to New York. Live migration used to be limited to functioning just within the same server, but now it can be performed between clusters. Woolsey said that it is possible to perform 120 live migrations at a time using NIC teaming and SMB 3.0, which are part of Windows Server 2012.

Laing noted that Windows Server 2012's shared-nothing live migration capability allows users to update and patch servers without affecting the service. He also noted that Microsoft focused on enabling automation with Windows Server 2012, adding more than 2,400 PowerShell commandlets. Another Windows Server 2012 feature noted by the speakers is its scale-out file server capability, which enables nodes to be added automatically as needed, such as after a node failure.

IIS 8.0 and .NET 4.5 Improvements

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, talked about Internet Information Service 8.0 on Windows Server 2012, saying that it is optimized to support multitenancy in the cloud. Users can dynamically expand the number of servers across the network and use CPU throttling to provide better isolation. IIS 8.0 also enables better management of the Secure Sockets Layer, he said. Windows Server 2012 comes with .NET Framework 4.5, which adds support for ASP.NET 4.5, HTML 5, Web APIs and WebSockets, as well as better support for asynchronous programming. Scott Hunter, principle programmer lead, demonstrated how to add three lines of code to modify an app for use on mobile devices.

Guthrie also stressed the portability of code from Windows Server 2012 to Windows Azure. Using Windows Azure is also a way to expose data to multiple users, he said. His main point was that Microsoft was offering a platform that enables public, private and hybrid cloud environments, along with the ability to scale resources as needed.

BYOD and VDI Support

Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division, talked about bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios enabled by Windows Server 2012. The key is Microsoft's use of Active Directory, both for the server and for Windows Azure. He claimed that Microsoft enables user productivity on any devices anywhere, as well as security and management. Direct Access technology in Windows Server 2012 can be used to extend access to the network by devices globally. Control over access to content by devices can be established using Microsoft's dynamic access control technology, which classifies data and specifies who can access the data. Anderson talked a little about governance and control as being necessary for the BYOD, an idea he previously offered up during a TechEd Europe session.

Windows Server 2012 supports virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) scenarios, which can be set up in "13 clicks" in combination with the use of System Center Configuration Manager, according to Anderson. He acknowledged that storage issues tend to dog VDI deployments, but claimed that Windows Server 2012 can help reduce those storage costs.

To view the Windows Server 2012 launch event talks, see Microsoft's Webcast portal page here. For an IT pro review of Windows Server 2012, check out this Redmond article. An evaluation copy of Windows Server 2012 can be accessed at this page.

source: Redmondmag.com

Apple/Samsung: The Verdict on Innovation

The uncertainty over Android could slow the development of technology.

Knockoff?: The Samsung Galaxy S, left, next to Apple's iPhone 4 in a store window last year in Seoul, South Korea. Last week a U.S. jury found that 21 Samsung phones and tablets infringed on Apple patents.
AP/Ahn Young-joon

A $1 billion U.S. jury verdict last week did more than determine that Samsung's smartphones and tablets violated Apple's patents—it also clouded the future of products and research based on Google's open-source Android operating system.

Android, which is built into Samsung's products, is used in more than 60 percent of the nearly 700 million smartphones expected to be sold worldwide this year, according to IDC, a leading technology research firm. In the months before the verdict, Google was already taking major steps to shore up its patent portfolio in order to protect Android, including by buying Motorola Mobility (see "Why Google Wants Motorola" and "Google's Troubled Search for Valuable Patents").

So the verdict (see "Apple Wins Big in Major Patent Trial") has likely been a shock to many handset manufacturers, researchers, and product developers. Indeed, because Android is an open-source platform, it often serves as a major research test bed for next-generation wireless technology.

For example, anyone who wants to use now-familiar techniques like "pinching" and tapping a screen to zoom in on an image—which the jury decided violated Apple patents—will now have to think about whether this will trigger costly legal problems.

While the big smartphone players ultimately have incentives to settle matters and work together, that sort of concern dampens innovation, says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT whose work includes a recent examination of the connection between the strength of patent protection and innovative output. "The implications for innovation are bad. This will block innovation because people cannot use promising ideas easily, and it will make everything much more bureaucratic, which is a huge problem already," he says. "It's a terrible verdict. It makes a mockery of patents. If anything good will come out of this, it is that we will take the idea of abolishing software patents more seriously."

But others experts disagree, saying the decisions could enhance innovation by signaling that new ideas—especially ideas surrounding design and user interfaces—are worth investing in. "My own guess is this is probably a net add for innovation," says R. Polk Wagner, a professor who specializes in intellectual property law at the University of Pennsylvania.

Features like pinch-to-zoom feel obvious precisely because of the commercial success of the iPhone, he points out. Its natural feeling "makes it seem crazy that you could patent something like that," he says, but that overlooks the fact that before Apple patented it, nobody was doing it. In any event, some of these design problems can be overcome with alternative approaches, he predicts. "Pinch-to-zoom and momentum scrolling, those sorts of things—my view is they're more ornamental rather than fundamental aspects of operating smartphones."

Still, the verdict is giving pause to some researchers who work on the Android platform. Anything that threatens to distract Google's Android team from improving the core of Android, and thus keep up with competing operating systems, stands to hurt such research, says Ivan Seskar, an associate director and researcher at Winlab at Rutgers University (see "Do Patents Slow Down Innovation?").

"Most probably, this will slow down technology development quite a lot," he says. "It will do two things—it will force Google and others who are heavily invested in Android to circumvent the stuff that looks like iPhone. They will have to make something that looks different—having nothing to do with technology, but with appearances. And people who were thinking about developing Android-based products will start looking at RIM [Research in Motion, makers of Blackberry] and Windows, not because they are necessarily better technology, but they don't look like iPhone and chances are they won't be sued."