Overview
When it comes to building a private cloud, offering cloud services, or securely connecting to clouds, the message is clear: organizations want a consistent, integrated approach that helps them solve fundamental business and IT challenges. They also want to take advantage of new applications and services that can be deployed on-premises and in public cloud environments. Cloud optimize your IT infrastructure with the next release of Windows Server codenamed "Windows Server 8" and get the best possible solution to meet these unique needs.
Windows Server 8 brings the experience from building and operating public clouds to delivering the most dynamic, available, and cost-effective server platform for the private cloud. It offers businesses and hosting providers a scalable, dynamic, and multitenant-aware cloud infrastructure that securely connects across premises and allows IT to respond to business needs faster and more efficiently.
Benefits
It takes you beyond virtualization
Windows Server 8 offers a dynamic, multitenant infrastructure that goes beyond virtualization technology to help deliver a complete platform for building a private cloud. Going beyond virtualization lets you scale and secure workloads, cost effectively build the cloud, and securely connect to cloud services. Windows Server 8 will help you provide:
- A complete virtualization platform that delivers a fully isolated, multitenant environment with tools that can guarantee service-level agreements, enable chargebacks through usage-based billing, and support self-service delivery.
- Increased scalability and performance through a high-density, highly scalable environment that can be modified to perform at the optimum level based on your needs.
- Connectivity to cloud services using a common identity and management framework for secure and reliable cross-premises connectivity.
It delivers the power of many servers, with the simplicity of one
Windows Server 8 offers you excellent economics by integrating a highly available and easy-to-manage multiserver platform. Windows Server 8 helps IT professionals cloud-enable their infrastructure while satisfying business needs faster and more efficiently by providing a highly available, easy-to-manage multiserver platform with the following benefits:
- Continuous availability: New and improved features offer cost-effective, high IT service uptime. They are designed to endure failures without disrupting services to users.
- Management efficiency: Windows Server 8 helps automate an even broader set of management tasks and simplifies deployment and virtualization of major workloads, which provides a path to full lights-out automation.
- Cost efficiency: Windows Server 8 leverages commodity storage, networking, and server infrastructure, as well as offering increased power efficiency for superior acquisition and operating economics.
It opens the door to every app on any cloud
Windows Server 8 is the broadest, most scalable and elastic web and application platform, giving you the flexibility to build and deploy applications on-premises, in the cloud, and in a hybrid environment, using a consistent, open set of tools and frameworks. Windows Server 8 will help you deliver:
- Flexibility to build on-premises and in the cloud: Developers can use the same languages and tools to build on-premises and cloud applications, allowing them to build applications that use distributed and temporally decoupled components.
- An open web platform: Windows Server 8 combined with Internet Information Services (IIS) offers a solid platform for both open-source web stacks and ASP.NET, opening up a wide range of choices for application development.
- A scalable and elastic web platform: Hosting providers can use new features in Windows Server 8 to increase density, simplify management, and achieve higher scalability in a shared web-hosting environment.
It enables the modern workstyle
Windows Server 8 empowers IT to provide users with flexible access to data and applications, anywhere on any device, while simplifying management and maintaining security, control, and compliance. Windows Server 8 will help you offer:
- Access anywhere on any device: Seamless, always-on access to virtualized work environments from anywhere, including branch locations and public connectivity services.
- A full Windows experience anywhere: By enabling a personalized and rich user experience from any device while adapting to different network conditions quickly and responsively.
- Enhanced data security and compliance: Central audit and access policies enable granular access to data and corporate resources based on strong identity, data classification, and simplified administration for remote access.
Today at the Microsoft BUILD conference I had the pleasure of introducing the developer preview of the next release of Windows Server codenamed Windows Server 8, now available on MSDN. In a room full of software developers and hardware partners I got to share some of our thinking behind the design of Windows Server 8 to help them prepare their new and existing applications, systems, and devices for the new release. Now, on this blog, I want to share that same thinking more broadly with a series of posts from me and members of my team.
Let me start with a reminder that this is a developer preview version, the purpose of which is to enable our development team to engage with the industry as we progress toward final release. This developer preview is not for deployments in enterprise environments. However we do welcome feedback from IT professionals doing early evaluations, and I would like to thank many of you for your help in getting us to this point. So far we have surveyed over 26,000 customers, had more than 200 customer meetings and documented over 6000 customer requirements during the course of planning and development.
As the person who leads Windows Server and Windows Azure engineering, I have had the experience of building and operating a cloud platform. We have been able to apply many of our insights from Windows Azure to Windows Server 8, enabling us to deliver world class cloud capabilities to enterprises of all sizes. Windows Server 8 will be a big leap forward, especially in terms of helping IT organizations progress beyond virtualization to build private cloud services. We innovated and worked with the industry on virtualizing network and storage infrastructures for multitenant support. Our goal is to give customers the choice and flexibility to build and deploy applications across their choice of private and public cloud environments, or a combination of both.
Another big area of focus is on manageability and serviceability of cloud infrastructure without service down time. For example, one of the most common customer comments we have heard is that patching and updating servers is a costly and error prone process. We are delivering new technologies, such as “cluster aware updating,” and the ability to script workflows with Powershell to make it an easier and repeatable process to patch multiple servers while maintaining continuous service availability.
Continuous availability of services typically requires expensive hardware infrastructure, but not every IT organization can afford the necessary hardware. So, with Windows Server 8 we are delivering high availability and disaster recovery at a much better price point, using software technologies and commodity networking, storage and servers. For example, we are giving customers access to high-end storage capabilities that before required specialized hardware, such as device pooling, disk virtualization, and thin provisioning, in Windows Server 8. To evaluate how development is progressing I have a server in my office with 10 disk drives ranging in size from .5 to 3 terabytes. I find it very easy and quick to pool the disk drives, create volumes, and have them available for service within minutes using the new built in tools.
This is just a taste of what’s coming in Windows Server 8. There is much, much more to discuss over the coming weeks and months, so I’ve asked some of our engineering leaders to write posts on this blog to further explain some of the hundreds of new features. Be on the lookout for those posts in the coming weeks and months. We look forward to engaging with you on the new technologies in Windows Server 8.
Best, Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud
