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Unfortunately client commitments meant I was unable to make Computex this year but I have been following coverage. There were a few interesting announcements that I think are worth sharing thoughts on including those from Microsoft, Intel, ARM partners and QNAP. Read the full story

Over the past few months I have looked at a number of different CPUs including the Intel Atom Pineview D510 platform, the AMD Brazos E-350 platform, and a number of Xeon E3 series CPUs like the Xeon E3-1230. At the same time I have been playing with those CPUs and a lot of previous generation hardware with Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and have some thoughts on hardware that I thought I would share. Read the full story

Recently Microsoft released an iSCSI Target for Windows Server 2008 R2. This is something that many users have requested for a long time, and with the introduction of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, it became a logical add-on to offer with Windows Server 2008 R2. Perhaps the best part of the software is that Microsoft offers this software with attractive pricing, in that it is free!

One can get information about the Miscrosoft iSCSI Target and access the download on TechNet. Read the full story

Major news this week including the Intel Xeon E3-1200 series and Bromolow platform launch, Microsoft releasing a free iSCSI target for Windows Server 2008 R2  and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, and Windows Home Server 2011 moving to RTM status and being released to OEMs, TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Read the full story

One of the great new features in Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (SBS2011E) is the ability to backup the system drives easily. This was a feature that Windows Home Server v1 was generally lacking and is something that users have taken for granted at this point with newer, more full featured versions of Windows Server platforms. Microsoft has been doing a great job of making server administration easy for the novice in SBS2011E and Windows Home Server 2011 and includes a simple dashboard interface to create backups. This guide will show, using the current beta version of SBS2011E both the easy way to configure backups and the more full featured, but harder way. Read the full story

This week did not have any ultra exciting announcements like Windows Home Server 2011, a Cougar Point bug or anything of that nature, so I picked a few top tidbits that I saw this week.

TrendFocus releases Q4’2010 Hard Drive Market Analysis Report

TrendFocus published its Q4 2010 report on the worldwide hard drive market titled Storage Demand Analysis System CQ4 ’10 Quarterly Update, Executive Summary.

Some interesting stats from the Executive Summary:

Approximately 167 Million HDDs shipped for 88 Exabytes of capacity and the market share numbers put Western Digital in front with Seagate close behind. Hitachi comes in third from a market share perspective. This includes not just desktop drives but also enterprise, notebook, and consumer electronics.

HDD Supplier CQ4 2010
Market Share Percentage  in Units

Trendfocus has subscriptions to regular, detailed reports if you are really into these statistics.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 hit RTM and Release Dates Announced

Windows Server 2008 R2

Word on the street from Microsoft is that Service Pack 1′s for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit RTM and will be released shortly. For MSDN and TechNet subscribers Service Pack 1′s will be available on 16 February 2011 and for everyone else on 22 February 2011.

The Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is basically a roll-up of updates and patches without Windows XP SP2-like upgrades. Perhaps the biggest for home server users is the new Remote Desktop client that can take advantage of RemoteFX.

On the other hand, the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 gets some really cool new features like RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory. RemoteFX will basically allows Windows 7 virtual machines hosted in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 to boost graphics performance if the server’s hardware allows it. Dynamic Memory is a technology that allocates memory based on a virtual machine’s need, which helps increase density because of more efficient memory allocation.

OCZ is Switching to 25nm NAND

OCZ Vertex 2

This news has been less well received. Apparently OCZ is now using newer, lower-cost 25nm NAND in their Vertex 2 line. The newer NAND is good for only 3,000 P/E cycles compared to 5,000 on older 34nm NAND. As a result, OCZ has increased overprovisioning so users will get less usable space on newer Vertex 2 drives than older ones. Initial user reports seem to also indicate that the newer 25nm NAND based Vertex 2 drives are slower than the older versions.

This really begs the question, can (or should) a company decrease usable storage space, and offer a lower performance product under the same name? Undoubtedly 25nm NAND is making OCZ’s drives less expensive to produce, but retail prices have not followed suit during the transition. Frankly, OCZ should label the 25nm parts “Vertex 2 SE” drives or something to designate the difference. Without a new designation, users researching based upon online reviews will be severely disappointed when they release the newly updated drives.

Microsoft-Nokia Partnership

This one is everywhere in the news. The quick story is that Nokia finally realized that Symbian was not going to let it challenge Apple’s iOS (not Cisco’s IOS btw) or Google’s Android in the future. The choice was either, 1. develop something new, 2. use Android, or 3. Team with Microsoft/ HP for either Windows 7 Mobile or WebOS. Nokia decided to go with Microsoft greatly expanding Windows 7 Mobile’s potential reach since Nokia has more than ten times Microsoft’s smartphone sales.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia fares in all of this. If this decision was a miss, then Nokia, one of the most dominating mobile phone companies over the last two or three decades will basically have to abandon a second platform in a short time frame. My only hope is that Microsoft puts some kind of awesome RemoteFX RDC client on a Nokia Windows 7 Mobile phone!

This was an exciting week, and one that had many home server blogs heating up the RSS feeds with both a big Intel flaw found and Microsoft releasing much anticipated release candidates. Read the full story

Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a very common virtualization platform for Windows based servers especially with the Windows Server 2008 R2 role, utilizes a different method of networking virtual machines than Microsoft’s VirtualPC (or XP mode on Windows 7 operating systems.) With VirtualPC the VMs hardware calls are sent to the host operating system, and then to the underlying hardware. With Hyper-V, virtual machines can communicate directly with the hardware. Read the full story

As many people have seen, the Windows Home Server team stated that Microsoft is abandoning Drive Extender V2 in Vail. Many are crying foul and have even started to petition Microsoft to bring the new Drive Extender back which currently has approximately 1,500 signers. While most other sites are crying foul, as Drive Extender in Vail added some RAID 10 features with check summing, I have been of the position that Windows Home Server V1 and Vail are better off without using Drive Extender V2. Read the full story

DuplicationInfo is a small Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that allows one to see what Drive Extender is doing. More specifically, DuplicationInfo allows a user to map a specific file stored on the WHS to the drives being used.

Read the full story