All providers have slightly different installation procedures and characteristics. This information should help you get started using the EMC provider which can be downloaded from Powerlink (you will need an account). Make sure you download the latest...

In my last blog, I discussed the industry standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) in general terms. Microsoft started supporting SMI-S for storage provisioning in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager, released earlier this year. With the...

Microsoft Research (MSR) and the Windows File Server team worked together to build a new Data Deduplication feature in Windows Server 2012 . This feature came from 2 years of collaboration with MSR on the design. The development of the architecture and...

About ten years ago, a group of engineers from different storage companies got together to create a powerful management abstraction that would enable tools for centralized storage environments like storage area networks (SAN) to become less vendor-specific...

Windows Server 2012 comes with a complete set of PowerShell cmdlets for iSCSI. By combining the iSCSI target, iSCSI initiator, and storage cmdlets, you can automate pretty much all management tasks. This blog post will provide you with some examples....

Following the introduction to Dynamic Access Control , I’d like to give you a few practical examples of how you can utilize Dynamic Access Control in your File Server environment. For many IT and Security architects that we talked to about Dynamic...

Hello all, we just published a new post for Dynamic Access Control on the Windows Server Blog: Introduction to Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control Here’s an excerpt: These focus areas were then translated to a set of Windows...

The iSCSI Target made its debut as a free download for Windows 2008 R2 in April 2011, since then, there were more than 60,000 downloads. That was the first step to make it available for everyone. Now in Windows Server 2012, no more downloads and separate...

Hi, this is Scott Johnson and I’m a Program Manager on the Windows File Server team. I’ve been at Microsoft for 17 years and I’ve seen a lot of cool technology in that time. Inside Windows Server 2012 we have included a pretty cool new feature called...

In previous releases of Windows, the server updating tools (e.g. WSUS) did not factor in the fact that a group of servers could be members of a highly-available cluster. As failover clusters are all about high availability of services hosted on the cluster...

The Interop conference is happening this week in Las Vegas (see http://www.interop.com/lasvegas ) and Mellanox is showcasing their high-speed ConnectX-3 network adapters during the event. They are showing an interesting setup with Windows Server 2012...

Everything here also applies to Windows 8. These features were first available in the Windows Server “8” Beta & Windows 8 Consumer Preview releases. See this document for protocol level details of these features. 1 Encryption SMB...

If you're planning to attend the TechEd 2012 North America event in June, here are the scheduled sessions with speakers from the File Server team: Code Title Speaker(s) Day Time Track Level WSV328 The Path to...

The Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server "8" Beta. This powerful toolkit will help you address compliance concerns with new features in Windows Server "8" Beta Join the Beta Program

1 Introduction 1.1 Overview of Primary Computer feature In Windows Server “8” Beta, administrators can designate a set of computers, known as primary computers, for each domain user, which controls which computers use Folder Redirection...

Robert Smith (Platforms Field Engineer) has recently posted a new blog that cover one important area of Windows performance that few people understand well. In his blog post he talks about how to use Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) in general and the...

Windows Server "8" Beta just became available and it includes a lot of new features in File and Storage Services. The Windows Server blog just released a post detailing a lot of the new File Server capabilities and scenarios included in the new release...

We have a new post that covers Windows Server "8" Beta and File Servers. It provides step-by-step instructions for deploying an evaluation version of SQL Server 2012 (just released last week) using a Windows Server “8” Beta Scale-Out File...

Identify, classify, and protect data across targeted file servers in your organization The Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce that the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 is now available for download...

Consistently identify, classify, and protect data across all file servers in your organization The Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce the Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta. Join the Beta...

I'd like to bring to your attention a recently published Technical Case Study from Microsoft IT that showcases how Microsoft IT is using FCI. Learn how Microsoft Information Technology (IT) used File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) to create a...

We have a new blog post out that explains the demo setup used in the TechEd 2011 presentation about Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services Consolidation. In the post, you get step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce the environment used in the presentation...

If you're attending TechEd 2011 this week, here are sessions from the File Server team: WSV313 - Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Application Storage, Diskless Boot, and More! Speaker(s): Jian (Jane) Yan Tuesday, May 17 at 5:00 PM, room: B101...

If you work with storage, you probably already heard about the “4K Sector Drives”, “Advanced Format Drives” and “512e drives”. These new “4K sector drives” abandon the traditional use of 512 bytes per sector...

The File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) is a free download from Microsoft that helps you determine the capacity of a specific file server configuration (running Windows or any operating system that implements the SMB or SMB2 protocols). It simulates a specific...