Monday, November 03, 2008

TechNet Keynote - Summary

Here’s the key points I pulled from today’s keynote at TechEd. I’ll post this as we go, with updates later!

Summary

The keynote did not have much really stunning news – most of the ‘announcements’ were well trailed and had been largely already announced. I was very dissapointed with no mention of PowerShell V2 (or announcing it’s availability!) and no mention at all of OCS 2007 R2. But hey – it’s great to see MS getting into recycling (and now recycling news).

General Stuff

  • TechEd 2009 is to be in Berlin (Hooray – I think!)
  • Brad Anderson is speaker – he’s the GM of the Management and Services Division.
  • Brad see's IT Priorities today as: Virtualisation, Cloud, Compliance, BI, Access Anywhere, Green IT
  • Dynamic IT is the key – 4 key areas (virtualisation, models of IT, service orientation (cloud), user focused (Win7)
  • Infrastructure Optimisation is a key aspect to enable dynamic IT or help organisations get there.
  • WiFi is poor (again) – although it managed to more or less be usable for the whole 90 minutes.

Virtulisation

  • Brad says, moving forward 5% of worlds power supply goes to powering IT data centres – wow!
  • A server at idle, uses 60& of full power .
  • Virtualisation gives 10:1 impact (each physical server can support 10 virtual servers) – 90% reduction in power usage.
  • Next release of Windows Server R2 – includes a new version of Hyper-V. Moving forward, Hyper-V will be updated with the OS and not out of band.
  • Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will have live migration (a feature dropped from first release of Hyper-V V1)
  • They did a System Center VMM demo – very cool
    • Everything starts with a model
    • PRO – performance resource optimisation – part of SCC VM monitors SLA compliance (and can make recommendations)
  • Virtualisation is not a product but a strategy (including server desktop, application and presentation). Not a new message.
  • Kidaro integrates into MDOP next year
  • MDOP the fastest selling product inside software licensing
  • App-V – application virtualisation is independent of the OS
  • Oslo is new modelling techniques to help manage the combination of app/server management

Green IT

  • MS is currently the largest commercial purchaser of servers today!
  • New data centres – one a quarter – based on green IT (using ambient air to do cooling).

Server 2008 R2

  • New Hyper-V version coming
  • Updates to IIS and ASP.NE on Server Core
  • Power Management improvements
  • PowerShell V2 including lots of new cmdlets (also as previously announced, PowerShell will run on Server Core)
  • Best practices analyser – no details of what it will look like
  • DirectAccss – VPN-less business across the internet.
  • Branch Cache – a caching solution to improve performance/decrease bandwidth demand for poorly connected sites
  • Bitlocker to go – encryption for disconnected media eg thumb drives

SQL Server

  • Kilimanjaro – next version
  • Gemini – self service BI analysis
  • Cool demo – lots more legs to BI!

Security

  • Forefront – built on Operations Manager, etc.
  • Next release of Forefront will be installable on top of existing ops manager implementation

Services (aka The Cloud)

  • Moving forward “Live” brand is consumer focused, “On-Line” is business brand
  • MS seem to be killing off 3rd party hosting partners
  • Coexistence between cloud and org starts with synching local AD with Cloud – this mean all YOUR AD Contents now are hosted by MS.
  • Launch in Spring 2009
  • Azure – launched last week at PDC contains key features to help you migrate to the cloud.

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