Today virtualization is expensive for licensing. Microsoft asks people to license every OS installed on virtual machines, even if powered off. But something is changing.
Since the release of Windows Server 2003 R2 Microsoft started approaching a per-use licensing model instead of a per-installation model. microsoft - comments - 13.1.2006
Google announced this week that it will be investing roughly $600 million USD in building a new data center facility in North Carolina. common - comments - 21.1.2007
Get a focused, first look at the features and capabilities in Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and the .NET Framework 2.0. If you currently work with Visual Basic 6, these authors fully understand the adoption and code migration issues you'll encounter. microsoft - comments - 12.4.2006
The Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 in an enterprise environment. Availability and configuration monitoring, performance data collection, and default thresholds are built for enterprise-level monitoring. Both local and remote connectivity checks help ensure database availability. microsoft - comments - 5.6.2006
The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX), is the new managed code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of the .NET Framework 2.0 with new technologies for building applications that have visually compelling user experiences, seamless communication across technology boundaries, and the ability to support a wide range of business processes. download - comments - 24.9.2006
Edit: Something close to my heart! I sure hope the R2 changes to DFS are as good as they sound in all the marketing documents!
microsoft - comments - 25.2.2006
Second annual Microsoft Office System Developers Conference highlights opportunity for custom solutions development utilizing innovations in the 2007 release. microsoft - comments - 23.3.2006
Microsoft confirmed today that they plan to release a public beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (formerly codenamed Morro) on June 23. microsoft - comments - 18.6.2009
It's hard to believe that Microsoft is already 30 years old. The company that made Redmond, Washington, a household name was actually founded in 1975 in another city by two young Seattle men, one of whom was a college dropout. From this inauspicious beginning came an equally improbable vision: A personal computer on every desk and in every home. Thirty years later, it seems so obvious. But at the time, when only a handful of people knew what a personal computer was, it was a great leap of faith and daring. common - comments -
Application Verifier is a runtime verification tool for unmanaged code that assists in quickly finding subtle programming errors that can be extremely difficult to identify with normal application testing. download - comments - 26.7.2006
Microsoft doesn't want you to pirate their software, but if you must choose between illegally installing Windows or a competitor's operating system, Microsoft would prefer that you choose them. microsoft - comments - 15.3.2007
A fortnight ago, detailed plans of the long anticipated Microsoft Store were revealed in all its theoretical glory when Gizmodo published over 50 slides from a Powerpoint presentation prepared by the projects consultancy firm. microsoft - comments - 5.8.2009
Demand for ICT specialists is growing; new portal site advertises job vacancies at Microsoft partners with guaranteed training. microsoft - comments - 25.3.2007
Four different wallpapers with those that are considered men best friend. Besides that, icons and sounds give a special touch in this theme, that is already a success in those that love dogs. Install it now! download - comments - 5.1.2006
Microsoft has seven "Microsoft Across America" trucks cruising the country, visiting Microsoft Partners at their request to show off the latest Windows wonders. At last count, there were exactly zero (0) "Linux Across America" trucks. microsoft - comments - 15.8.2006
There is still more work to be done on Windows Vista, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, on the day the company's highly-anticipated operating system is officially released to enterprise customers. windows - comments - 2.12.2006
If Microsoft's 1976 was all about "hobbyists" and "Altair," then its buzzwords for 2006 were things such as "connected entertainment," "interoperability," "Zune," and "Windows Vista." microsoft - comments - 2.1.2007
When I mentioned in a post yesterday that I had heard there was an alpha build of Internet Explorer (IE) 8.0 circulating inside Microsoft, some were skeptical. microsoft - comments - 15.1.2007
Microsoft Feeds Plus is an Internet Explorer 7 add-on for Windows XP/2003/Vista that makes your feed reading experience easy and efficient. You can read your feeds in a combined view (aggregate feeds) and get pop-up notifications when there are new items to read. download - comments - 27.1.2007
Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a deal with Yahoo!, asking the company to re-enter formal negotiations, The Post has learned. microsoft - comments - 5.5.2007
Two years ago, Microsoft used the Bill Gates keynote at its MIX conference as the launch pad for Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0, which shipped last year. However, this year at MIX07, news of the next IE version, which Microsoft has confirmed is in development, was not to be had. microsoft - comments - 6.5.2007
Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network. microsoft - comments - 6.6.2007
The official Microsoft U.K. Domain was attacked and defaced by a hacker identified as rEmOtEr. Microsoft confirmed that the hack has been successful. rEmOtEr altered a webpage in the Microsoft.co.uk domain with two images and multiple references to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. microsoft - comments - 1.7.2007
Microsoft has long been a landmark of monopoly worldwide. But this detail is about to change as the Redmond company has evolved, following the various antitrust rulings against it both at home and abroad. In this context, Microsoft has suffered antitrust scrutinies not only in the U.S. but also in the European Union as well as in South Korea. microsoft - comments - 16.10.2007
A computer screen that also acts as a two-handed touch interface and a crude infrared camera has been developed by researchers at Microsoft's labs in the UK. microsoft - comments - 23.10.2007
Microsoft has signed a deal to purchase Danger, the makers of the T-Mobile Sidekick product but otherwise known as the Danger Hiptop to those within the industry. windows - comments - 11.2.2008
Sun on Tuesday introduced
"Project Blackbox,"
which is essentially a
datacenter enclosed in a
shipping container. Its
portability would allow for
quick setup in situations
where a fixed location is not
feasible... betanews.com - 18.10.2006
Microsoft officials recently peeled back the covers a bit on its datacenter futures by sharing some high-level strategy goals for its
"Generation 4" modular datacenter plans. But this modularization is only one piece of the company's longer-term goals and plans for its
cloud-computing infrastructure.
Some of you will remember our brief run through of an HP POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter) during the HP Factory Express tour that we attended at
the HP Tech Day event back in April. I think a lot of us drool at the processing and storage capacity potential that the POD represents, but there are
a lot of other factors that make the POD a serious, almost no-brainer contender when planning for a datacenter solution. HP POD solutions can provide
a complete, pre-configured, ready to plug in and get-to-work datacenter in six weeks. Try that with a traditional brick and mortar solution.
Microsoft is forging ahead internally with its Green Datacenter Initiative,
with teams across the company providing support, guidance and suggestions on how Microsoft can guide customers in reducing the environmental impact of
Microsofts technologies.
Microsoft Certified Architect Lewis Curtis who said he has been appointed Microsofts first
environmental evangelist provided an update on the companys green activities via a blog post on September 8. (That blog post has since been pulled
with no explanation as to why.)
Parked directly opposite the Moscone Center, San Francisco, Rackable Systems' ICE Cube Centro was something of any eyesore. However, it's also a
mobile datacenter that packs in, would you believe, 1,400 half-height servers each outfitted with couple of quad-core Xeons, providing a total of
11,200 processing cores.
The container also throws in 4.1 petabytes of storage for good measure, and the internal design is such
that there are no fans in the actual racks. Rather, cooling is centralised and, Rackmount states, can reduce cooling costs by 80 per cent when
compared to traditional datacenter setups.
The 40-foot containers fit on to the back of a lorry and, as such, can be transported
to the customer's location.
You can even hook a number of these containers together, should 11,200 processing cores be not up to
the task.
Microsoft has changed the
licensing of its Windows
Server Datacentre operating
system, allowing users buying
new servers licensed with the
OS to run an unlimited number
of virtualised Windows Server
instances.
Microsoft said that
unlimited virtualisation
rights would significantly
extend the savings customers
gain through server
consolidation on the Windows
Server platform.
"Together, Windows Server
2003 R2 Datacenter Edition and
Virtual Server 2005 R2 are an
ideal, cost-effective platform
for scale out'
virtualization," it said.
By licensing a
server's processors with
Windows Server Datacenter
Edition, users would be able
to run Windows Server Standard
Edition, Enterprise Edition,
Datacenter Edition or a mix of
the three editions without
having to track the number of
virtual machines or pay for
additional Windows Server
licences.
To better control energy consumption in its datacenters, Microsoft has deployed 2,000 internally built temperature and humidity sensors in several of
its facilities.
The sensors use ZigBee wireless technology to transmit the data to databases that analyze the information.
Data-center administrators can look at a graphical image of the datacenter that is color-coded based on temperature and at a glance see areas that are
getting hot.
Portable datacenters will be key to supporting the surging demand for online services, but equipment vendors need to start designing products
especially for them, a Microsoft engineer said Wednesday.
Microsoft has already shown its enthusiasm for portable datacenters,
which cram hundreds of servers into a standard 20-foot (6.1 meter) shipping container that can be delivered wherever it's needed, so long as there is
a power supply and network connection.
The company has said it will put more than 200 of them on the first floor of a datacenter
it's building in Chicago, and it is already operating at least one of its online services, Virtual Earth, from a portable datacenter in Colorado.
To help control costs, improve business agility, and remain secure and in compliance, many IT organizations are taking steps to transition to a truly
dynamic infrastructure. At the same time, many organizations are also planning to implement the next line of server products from Microsoft, yet are
challenged to find the fastest, least disruptive way to deploy this technology across the organization. Microsoft® System Center is a family of
leading IT management solutions that helps IT departments proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize an IT environment. And today, Microsoft has
made available the Server Management Suite Enterprisea license that brings together all of the capabilities needed to complete comprehensive,
life-cycle management of IT infrastructure. This white paper outlines these new capabilties.
VMware's CEO made his pitch on Tuesday for a new type of operating system for the datacenter, and in the process assigned the "traditional OS" to
the dustbin of history.
Speaking at the start of the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, CEO and president Paul Maritz described
VMware's plans to offer a "virtual datacenter OS" for managing server applications more flexibly and efficiently.
Just a week after celebrating the opening its “chiller-free”
Dublin datacenter, Microsoft is turning on its $500 million, 700,000-square-foot Chicago one.
Phase one of the
Chicago datacenter opened on September 30. Microsoft is turning on power in phases there so “customers today will enjoy top-notch
performance and availability while we control costs for Microsoft and its shareholders,” according to a September 28 post on the Microsoft
datacenters blog.
Later this year, Intel will
help server network interfaces
take advantage of the major
recent advances in
datacenters: multiprocessor
systems, multicore processors,
and virtualization.
The company unveiled at
Cisco Systems' Networkers
user conference a pair of
chips for server network cards
or motherboards. The Intel
82598 10-Gigabit Ethernet
Controller is set for
production in September, and
the 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet
Controller is shipping now to
system and component vendors.
The company did not disclose
pricing.
New and
emerging technologies are
boosting datacenter processing
power and helping enterprises
take advantage of the systems
they've invested in, but
network connections are still
catching up. They have become
the bottlenecks of new, faster
datacenters, said Sunil
Ahluwalia, a product line
manager in Intel's LAN access
division. The chips introduced
Monday include multiple
queues, virtualization
capability, packet
prioritization, and new
storage networking features to
break that bottleneck... winbeta.org - 24.07.2007
In May of last year, SPEC began soliciting feedback from the
industry on a forthcoming slate of power efficiency benchmarks. The first of those benchmarks, SPECpower_ssj2008, is now out, but a recent report from
Google indicates that the big villains in datacenter power consumption are now memory and networking components that don't provide much in the way of
power optimization. In other words, not matter how power efficient an Intel or an IBM makes its chips, the likes of Seagate and Western Digital will
now dominate the results of SPEC's new benchmark.
In this short analysis piece, I'll take a look at both the SPEC announcement
and the Google report, and at what the two of them say about the future of the datacenter.
Nick White: Today we're making a series of announcements outlining our company-wide strategy for virtualization from the desktop to the
datacenter.
<...> We have a vision that focuses on businesses employing our virtualization toolset to more simply and
cost-effectively manage their IT environments. We're calling that vision Dynamic IT. Dynamic IT is aiming to help IT professionals get more out of
their computing resources across both server and desktop environments. One of the benefits of this initiative is to enable IT managers to dynamically
make changes or add capacity to their deployments in a matter of minutes instead of hours (or even days). In a phrase, Dynamic IT is about
efficiently getting the necessary resources to users and computers at any given moment and with a minimum of hassle and effort. We expect this vision
to result in a whole new era of datacenter and desktop PC management, all hinging on virtualization technologies and Windows.
Central to the vision of Dynamic IT is the concept of the Optimized Desktop. The Optimized Desktop refers to virtualizing a user's applications
and profile together so that they follow that user, regardless of the location of the PC in use at the moment...
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/black
box/index.jsp>Project Blackbox
is a prototype of the world's
first virtualized
datacenter--built into a
shipping container and
optimized to deliver extreme
energy, space, and performance
efficiencies. Following is a
very neat video on the extreme
testing of Project Blackbox.
Longhorn Datacenter will have no extra virtualization costs