ISN blogger Akmal Shah has been checking out the 2012 edition of Microsoft Windows Server and sees potential for oil and gas IT shops. The new graphical user interface is based on the ‘Metro’ Windows 8 style GUI. Although Metro has been ‘much criticized,’ its use in Server 2012 is ‘less contentious’ as the interface defaults to the command line—making the new GUI optional.
A new Hyper-V virtualization engine promises to offer competition for Microsoft’s big rival VMware. Hyper-V’s scalability is much improved with, at the top end, 64 nodes capable of hosting up to four thousand virtual machines. An increase in virtual CPUs means that Hyper-V is now better suited to intensive workloads such as those seen in oil and gas companies.
Another key differentiator for oil and gas, according to ISN is Server 2012’s Storage Spaces disk I/O performance. This is ‘not far off native speeds’ and provides a cost effective means for adding and managing capacity and high availability.
Networking is enhanced with ‘DirectAccess,’ a VPN-like secure tunnel from any endpoint back to the corporate network without the overhead and performance hit of a true VPN. Shah believes that this functionality ‘will have valuable yet economical remote working benefits for our oil industry customers.’ Read Shah’s blog here.
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