What is the Largest Single Cost Category in Your IT Hardware Budget? If you're like most of the enterprise customer organizations that were surveyed when we were designing Windows Server 2012, your answer is probably the same as theirs: STORAGE! For the organizations we surveyed, we found that as much as 60% of their annual hardware budgets were allocated to expensive hardware SAN solutions due to ever-increasing storage requirements. Wouldn't it be nice to have some of that budget back for other IT projects? YES! We agree too ... that's why the server team included "Storage Spaces" in Windows Server 2012! Get Ready for "Storage Spaces"! "Storage Spaces" is a new storage virtualization technology that's included in Windows Server 2012 and our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 to provide SAN-like storage capabilities and performance using commodity hardware components, such as ... (more)

AppZero Collaborates with Microsoft to Support Windows Server

AppZero, a fast, more flexible way to move server applications, announced on Monday a collaboration with Microsoft in which Microsoft is recommending AppZero for moving a variety of applications from Windows Server 2003, which reaches the end of extended support in July, 2015, to Microsoft's newer operating systems. The collaboration will help educate Systems Integrators and enterprises about the benefits of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server Hyper-V, and Windows Azure. AppZero extracts existing applications, leaving the operating system behind, and migrates the applications to a new machine. Many applications can be moved without code changes from older operating systems to Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure with AppZero's enterprise migration tool. AppZero will be providing support for Windows Server 2012 R2 by the end of 2013. "Windows Server 2012 and Window... (more)

Jill T. Singer of CIA to Present at Cloud Computing Expo on November 2

As the pressure mounts to meet more stringent budgets, CIOs need to find the proper balance between transforming IT and reducing costs. IT operational costs continue to increase as a percentage of overall IT dollars. At the same time, IT is being pressured to provide an innovative, competitive advantage for the business. Will the Enterprise Cloud support both? Can the Enterprise Cloud make infrastructure operations faster, easier, cheaper, and safer while also unleashing the transformative creativity of the workforce? Will the Cloud be both a strong efficiency play as well as the Infrastructure's Ultimate Revenge by positioning IT to be the accelerator of corporate strategy instead of its bottleneck? All these questions, plus many more will be answered for you by Jill Singer during her session. The 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo is co-located wi... (more)

At-a-Glance: Comparing VMware vSphere 5.5 & Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

There’s been lots of buzz on the virtualization front over the past month …  In August, Microsoft announced the RTM version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the latest major releases of the Windows Server and System Center families.  In addition, at VMworld this year, VMware announced the latest edition of their vSphere hypervisor platform: VMware vSphere 5.5. IT Pros have been very interested in learning about the pros and cons presented by each offering – particularly because the total cost of Windows Server 2012 R2 + System Center 2012 R2 can be quite attractive in comparison to VMware’s offerings. More information: See Shopping for Private Clouds for a sample cost comparison between Microsoft and VMware virtualization solutions based on real-world requirements. With so many features called by differing names in each virtualization platform... (more)

Architecting Next-Gen Connected Supply Chains | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]

Disruptive macro trends in technology are impacting and dramatically changing the "art of the possible" relative to supply chain management practices through the innovative use of IoT, cloud, machine learning and Big Data to enable connected ecosystems of engagement. Enterprise informatics can now move beyond point solutions that merely monitor the past and implement integrated enterprise fabrics that enable end-to-end supply chain visibility to improve customer service delivery and optimize supplier management. Learn about enterprise architecture strategies for designing connected systems that integrate physical and digital supply chains with your enterprise systems, leveraging IoT devices, hybrid cloud and network service providers to enable innovative business models while mitigating risk, managing security and increasing capacity to meet customer changing SLA ... (more)

Belgium ReMix and Architect Forum: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines

I had a great time at ReMix and the Architect Forum in Belgium. I had a chance to cover build an application end-to-end with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services which was basically the this application. At the Architect Forum I had a chance to talk in more depth about the general application pattern we are thinking about for RIA applications. I shamelessly stole some slides from Nikhil Kothari for this one. Check out the slides.   ... (more)

To HTML5, or Not to HTML5, That Is the Question

If you've been following Sybase's announcements concerning their plans for future versions of PowerBuilder, you'll know that they are planning for PowerBuilder 15 to be able to generate a Silverlight application and are looking at having it generate applications based on HTML5 as well. If you've been following this column, you'll know I've been arguing that we need Silverlight generation much sooner than that. Back in November of 2008[1], I suggested that by the time PowerBuilder 12 was delivered, Microsoft would have Silverlight 3 out and it would be much more stable and ubiquitous. PowerBuilder 12 is here, and Microsoft is actually already on Silverlight 4. According to statowl.com, Silverlight was installed in 20% of browsers in November of 2008 and is now installed in 56% of browsers. Riastats.com indicates that Silverlight 4 is installed in 56% of browsers, an... (more)

Migrating to Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 from 2008 R2 and VMware vSphere

Hyper-V Server 2012 is Microsoft's completely free type-1 hypervisor product.  Unlike some other competing free hypervisors, Hyper-V Server 2012 has the same virtualization scale and availability features as the Hyper-V role in licensed editions of Windows Server 2012, but it's optimized for running only the Hyper-V hypervisor on bare metal.  It's a great solution when you're looking to deploy dedicated hypervisor hosts within your shop.  The result?  An enterprise-scale type-1 hypervisor for FREE! You can get more details on Hyper-V Server 2012 here. Recently, I was involved in a project that was migrating from Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 to Hyper-V Server 2012.  Due to architectural changes involved in implementing the new features in Hyper-V Server 2012, a direct in-place upgrade is not possible.  However, the across-the-wire migration process we used below was strai... (more)

Step-by-Step: Speaking iSCSI with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 and our completely free Hyper-V Server 2012 certainly have some really cost-effective new storage options, with Storage Spaces and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0.  However, many IT Pros have already invested in iSCSI shared storage and, as a result, many Hyper-V deployments also need to be able to leverage these existing storage investments. iSCSI? No problem! Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 include native support for a software iSCSI initiator as well as MPIO ( Multipath IO ) for  resiliency and load balancing of storage IO over multiple network paths. In this article, we’ll walk through the process of connecting Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 to common iSCSI storage arrays.  Because most of my IT Pro friends are running Hyper-V either on Windows Server 2012 Server Core or Hyper-V Server 2012, both options without a local console GU... (more)

Android to Windows Phone 8: Manage Network Usage

It’s more than likely that a Windows Phone app will need to work with data that resides on the Internet. For example, an app may aggregate data from various news sources using RSS feeds. Consuming this type of data in a Windows Phone app is very similar to consuming it in an Android app. In this post I’ll show you how to manage network usage. It’s important to consider how your Windows Phone app will access network resources once it has the capability to do so. If your app is going to perform a large number of network operations or transfer large amounts of data (e.g. audio/video streaming) you should allow the user to control when these operations are performed. In a Windows Phone app you can put the user in control over network usage in four steps. First, create an enumeration representing various states of connectivity: public enum ConnectionState { NotConnecte... (more)

Installing the Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Experience Step-by-Step

In Windows Server 2012 we introduced a new version called Windows Server 2012 Essentials edition.  The Essentials server is very flexible and easy-to-use.  This was a server solution that was primarily designed and priced for small businesses with up to 25 users and 50 devices.  This provided a great first server for many customers, as well as it can be used as the primary server in a multi-server environment for small businesses. With the new Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Server we really added many features to make this an even more rounded server.  The Essential server also provides a ton of flexibly for deployment and functionality.  We even included the popular client computer backup from Windows Home server.  The Windows Server Essentials Experience role is available in Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard and Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter. What’s New In Wi... (more)