Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Standard

Storage plays a critical role in cloud and data center services. With the increase of new applications for continuous services, storage requirements continue to grow. Windows Server 2012 includes a number of storage features and capabilities to address the storage challenges your organization faces. Whether you want to use cost-effective industry-standard server hardware or a high-end storage area network for the most demanding workloads: Windows Server 2012 provides you with a comprehensive set of features to help you get the most out of your storage investment.

Windows Server 2012 was designed from the ground up with a strict focus on storage. Improvements range from provisioning of storage, to the way data is clustered and transferred over the network, to access and management. You can combine these flexible options to meet your business needs. In other words: Windows Server 2012 storage solutions deliver the efficiency, performance, resilience, and availability you need at every level.

Storage - Functions
Windows Server 2012 offers you a comprehensive set of features to help you get the most out of your storage investment. Learn more about some of the key storage features of Windows Server 2012

Storage Spaces
Storage Spaces represent a new class of advanced virtualization enhancements to the storage stack. They allow you to pool multiple physical disk units and deliver them to your workloads as feature-rich, highly resilient and reliable storage arrays. You can use storage spaces to create storage pools - virtualized administration units that are composed of physical disk units. These storage pools enable storage aggregation, elastic capacity expansions and delegation of administration. You can also create virtual disks with associated properties that have a certain level of resilience, thin or fixed provisioning, and automatic or controlled allocation to various storage media.

Offloaded Data Transfers
Offloaded Data Transfers (ODX) gives you the ability to leverage your investment in external storage arrays to offload data transfers from the server to these devices. While traditional transmissions require that this data be sent through servers, ODX bypasses these intermediary stations with a token-based mechanism for reading and writing data within or between intelligent storage arrays. The network and CPU load is also reduced.

SMB 3.0 support for server workloads
With enhancements to the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, Windows Server 2012 allows Hyper-V virtual machines and SQL databases to be deployed on SMB file shares. The client and server parts of Windows Server 2012 are optimized for small random I/O reads and writes to improve performance for workloads of common server applications. This - along with transparent SMB failover and clustered share volume extensions - provides you with a reliable, cost-effective solution for your server workloads.

File System Extensions
Windows Server 2012 introduces a new file system called Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is built for the future with significant improvements in data integrity, availability and scalability. Additionally, the NTFS file system has been enhanced to maintain data integrity even when using cost-effective industry standard SATA drives. Online damage checking and repair capabilities reduce the need to take volumes offline. Significant improvements in Chkdsk allow you to identify and isolate problems with specific files. This ensures that parts of the volume can only be taken offline for a few seconds instead of several hours or whole days as before.

Storage management
To bring all these storage functions together and simplify the management of increasingly complex storage environments, Windows Server 2012 introduces a new, unified interface. It uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for comprehensive management of physical and virtual storage and can include external storage subsystems from third-party vendors. The unified interface allows the use of WMI to provide IT professionals with a rich Windows PowerShell scripting experience and thus a broad set of solutions. It also enables management applications to use a single Windows API to manage different types of storage. Storage management providers or standards-based protocols like the Storage Management Initiative Specification make it possible. In addition, you can use the new File and Storage Services dashboard to manage storage across your entire data center through the Server Manager.

Scope of delivery:

- Original license key for telephone/online activation of Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Standard German.
- Verified Highspeed Downloadlink to get the software fast & secure, alternatively it can be downloaded directly from Microsoft.
- invoice with declared VAT
- Instructions for easy installation.

Note: This offer does not include a product key sticker (COA label) This offer is aimed at private individuals as well as companies, business customers, authorities, organisations, schools, communities and churches.