MS Windows Home Server

Windows Storage Server 2012 Released

Microsoft have released Windows Storage Server 2012 to its hardware partners.

You can get your hands on an evaluation version from the Microsoft Download Center and full OEM versions from TechNet, MSDN and MAPS.

Our goals for storage were to deliver innovations in four areas:

• Reducing the cost of storage
• Storage management efficiency
• Performance and capabilities
• Reliability and continuous availability

New capabilities:

 

Reducing storage costs and increasing cost effectiveness	Increasing storage management efficiency
Storage Spaces ReFS CSV v2 Thin Provisioning Data Deduplicatìon NFSv2, NFSv3, and NFSv4.1 support	Comprehensive Storage Management New Windows PowerShell cmdlets SMI-S and SMP support Remote Storage Management All from a single interface
Improving performance and capabilities	Maximizing reliability and availability
SMB Direct SMB Multichannel SMB Scale Out SQL Server over SMB Hyper-V over SMB Offloaded Data Transfer Live Storage Migration Virtual Fibre Channel	Continuous Availability for SMB, iSCSI and NFS Online scanning and repair in NTFS and ReFS Faster CHKDSK in NTFS Storage Spaces with ReFS SMB Transparent Failover Cluster-Aware Updating

More information can be found at the Windows Storage Server blog.

My Server App for Windows Phone for WS2012 Essentials

The Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog gives us a run down on the My Server app for windows phone for Windows Server 2012 Essentials (that’s a mouth full!).

Available now in the Windows Phone store the My Server app will allow you to view the following information from Windows Server 2012 Essentials:

• Server management and monitoring, enabling you to manage alerts, devices, or accounts.
• Access to shared folders and files.
• Keeps a history of the files that users have recently accessed so that they can reopen these files without navigating to a folder.
• A centralized library for media playback – The streaming logic has been we have optimized to deliver a better media experience over networks with differing bandwidths.

Admins can also:

• Check alerts by using My Server and ignore or repair them accordingly.
• Disable or enable any user account that you think is not in good status.
• Change the password of user accounts when necessary.
• Keep track of devices that have joined your server domain.
• Start or stop the backup process for any device online.

Lots more details are available in the following post on the Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog.

Virivault Online Backup from ViridianPC

ViridianPC have launched Virivault their online backup service.

The Virivault backup client provides the facility to backup your server to both a local target on your network (such an a NAS or even a second server), and to secure off-site storage which is provided by Amazon’s S3 cloud storage system, with storage facilities in North America and Europe. The software can be configured with separate backup jobs, so for example large volumes of data like a video collection can be backed up locally, where as smaller and possibly irreplaceable data like office documents and photos can be stored off-site.

The backup client even supports continuous backups, so files are copied to the off-site storage as they are created or modified for near-instant protection.

A monthly subscription costs from £5 with a free 30 day trial available.

More details are available from here.

Paul Thurrott Chooses Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Paul Thurrott is choosing Windows Server 2012 Essentials for his home office after comparing it to WHS 2011 on his HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L.

…if you can put up with a bit of complexity – and the cost, what you get in return in a real server.

Paul takes us through his setup and also explains to us the differences between using Windows 8 compared to Essentials.

Its a great read which you can find here.

The BYOB Podcast Episode 99

Episode 99 of the BYOB podcast is up:

“Ivy Bridge i3 is finally here! Server woes, venting, rants, discussion. iPhone 5, Lumina 920 We’re getting them, but the real issue isn’t the hardware its shared data plans.”

You can find episode 99 here.