Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
Edinburgh 16th of July 2012 -
New technology roadmap
We had an interesting week at the Microsoft WPC in Toronto. 16,000 partners attended, 450 from the UK.
Quorum were one of a handful of Scottish Companies who attended and it was excellent to to see a strong presence from Microsoft Scotland including Regional Director Derrick McCourt and Scottish Technical Advisor Pete Ferry
Here are some of the technologies and services we will be championing over the coming year:
Windows Server 2012
Due out next month, this is the glue that holds all the services together. From our early deployments it is a very strong enterprise product. New features include
GUI OptionsWindows Server 2012 uses the new Metro UI. Also we can switch between Server Core and the GUI (full) installation options without a full reinstallation. There is also a new third installation option that allows MMC and Server Manager to run, but without Windows Explorer or the other parts of the normal GUI shell
ReFS ReFS (Resilient File System, originally codenamed "Protogon") is a new file system initially intended for file servers that improves on NTFS. Particularly for customers with extremely large numbers of files.
Hyper-V
Many new features have been added to Hyper-V, including network virtualization, multi-tenancy, storage resource pools, cross-premise connectivity, and cloud backup. Additionally, many of the former restrictions on resource consumption have been greatly lifted. Each virtual machine in this version of Hyper-V can access up to 32 virtual processors, up to 512 gigabytes of random-access memory, and up to 16 terabytes of virtual disk space per virtual hard disk (using a new .vhdx format). Up to 1024 virtual machines can be active per host, and up to 4000 can be active per failover cluster.
We also saw demonstrations of live migration via Ethernet with no shared storage. This has big implications for companies wishing to deploy DR environments without the costs and additional hardware required for VMware like components such as Site Recovery Manager.
System Centre 2012
Spans physical, virtual and cloud computing models with common management experiences throughout.
Provides comprehensive end-to-end management for your infrastructure and applications, including interoperability for heterogeneous environments.
Offers compelling economic value
Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection provide a unified infrastructure to manage and protect physical, virtual, and mobile client environments, helping IT empower users to be productive from anywhere, on whatever device they choose.
Provide a unified infrastructure for client management and protection, making it easier and faster to administer client systems and maintain system compliance
System Centre 2012- Orchestrator
Deserving of a heading of its own Orchestrator is an extremely extensible and integrated automation engine for managing large numbers of "Devices". This is an extremely powerful tool allowing us to do the type of automation that we couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago. From those of us who came from a background working with heavy automation using Tivoli or BMC Patrol, this is a revelation and something we will develop extensively as part of our capability portfolio
Windows 8 Mobile - Tablet - Desktop
The new family of Windows client devices are tightly integrated and offer the best attempt at a unified code base and device management with Microsoft In-Tune
Metro Applications
Line of Business Applications for Metro will be a strong theme within Quorum over the next 12 months and we will be contacting our customers and partners about possible pilots.
