server

There wasn't a ton of news out of day 2 of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, but the company did announce a few product milestones.

Its small and midsize business server products have both hit the near-final "release candidate" stage. Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (formerly code-named Centro) and Small Business Server 2008 (nee Cougar) are scheduled to launch and be fully available on November 12.

Microsoft also said its recently completed Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor is now available via Windows Update, as expected. The product had been available since late last month, but only as a manual … Read more

Microsoft today released its July 2008 security bulletin highlighting items all considered important but not critical. They are for Domain Name Service in Windows, Windows Explorer within Windows Vista, Outlook Web Access (OWA), and Microsoft SQL servers. All Microsoft security patches for both Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via the individual bulletins detailed below.

MS08-037: Important

Entitled "Vulnerabilities in DNS Could Allow Spoofing (953230)," this bulletin is for users of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003; not affected are users of Windows Vista (both 32-bit and 64-bit editions) and Windows Server … Read more

A number of us at CNET News noticed that Facebook was having some outage issues on Monday afternoon, delivering "connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" messages to members of our editorial staff in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

The off-and-on outages would make the social network available to some while inaccessible to others, and sometimes lasted for a few minutes before coming back. Facebook has not yet confirmed the presence of outages, but a company spokeswoman said via e-mail that she was looking into it. Meanwhile, connections appear to have been restored … Read more

Microsoft did something that it rarely does last week when it announced availability of its Hyper-V server virtualization technology months ahead of schedule. Unlike Microsoft Virtual Server, which ran as an application, Hyper-V is a true hypervisor capable of hosting multiple instances of Windows and even Suse Linux.

OK, so Microsoft is in the game, but can it compete with server virtualization king VMware? Yup. According to ESG Research, 69 percent of organizations planning to adopt server virtualization are considering Microsoft technology, 59 percent are considering VMware, 10 percent are contemplating XenSource, and 4 percent are kicking the server virtualization … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Revamping existing data centers can achieve energy efficiency close to those built from scratch to be greener, according to an early report Thursday from Accenture, which analyzed results of case studies backed by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

The energy savings explored, if widespread, could prevent the release of carbon dioxide equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road, researchers said.

Data center energy use could double by 2011, amounting to $7.4 billion in U.S. electricity costs and requiring the equivalent of 10 new power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

"Just … Read more

Microsoft is expected this week to announce that it has completed work on Hyper-V, a virtualization technology that allows a single server to act as many separate servers.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported Tuesday that Microsoft is expected tomorrow to say it has released the product.

The move will allow Microsoft to fulfill its pledge of releasing Hyper-V within 180 days of the release of Windows Server 2008, which launched in February. The company issued a near-final "release candidate" version in March.

To make its target, however, Microsoft was forced last year to strip out several features from the product, … Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Chipmakers have been applying lessons learned in mobile computing to servers in an effort to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption. But a noted Google engineer threw some cold water on the approach on Monday, arguing the two styles of computing are too different.

"The data center is a different device than the key targets for mobile electronics, laptops, and mobile devices," said Luis Barroso, a Google engineer who closely studies the company's power consumption, speaking at the O'Reilly Velocity conference here.

And naturally, with at least hundreds of thousands of servers in operation … Read more

Updated 3:12 p.m. to correct the number of the highest ranking Windows cluster

While Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop and well represented in the server racks, until recently it has been nearly absent from the world's largest supercomputers.

Starting several years ago, though, Microsoft made a concerted effort at this part of the market, creating a separate version of Windows solely for computing clusters.

The first big fruits of that effort were evidenced in this year's top 500 list of the world's biggest supercomputers. Five of those on the list were Windows clusters, including … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday said it's set to release near-final versions of its key database server and other business-oriented software.

The company announced a "release candidate" of SQL Server 2008, along with test versions of security and identity management software, at its TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla.

Also on tap for later this month is a release candidate of Microsoft Application Virtualization, version 4.5, the company said. Microsoft also announced a server-virtualization validation program, which lets software developers test and validate their code running against Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of the operating system.

Microsoft Senior … Read more