Switch Systems Blog

In a recent blog post, Microsoft explain their reasoning for removing the Drive Extender technology which was to allow WHS style drive pooling and fault tolerance.

Whilst a lot of people will see this as a step backwards, I’m personally happy with this decision – drive extender tech makes it a lot harder for us ‘real’ sysadmins to determine where data lies in a disaster recovery situation, plus we’re much more familiar with RAID based solutions.

A big part of our business is supporting Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS). SBS is a collection of Microsoft technologies consisting of Windows Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, all of which are tightly integrated to make a good value offering for small businesses to step up their infrastructure to a more efficient, secure and centrally managed solution.

Microsoft have just announced the latest editions of SBS. Codenamed “Aurora”, SBS 2011 Essentials aims to align with Microsoft’s strategy of storing data in the Cloud (distributed on-line servers, much like Web E-Mail), while maintaining the already mature features like Remote Access, automatic server backups and remote web workplaces.

Another SBS name change, SBS 7 is now to be known as SBS 2011 Standard.

We continue to look with interest at Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy, and no doubt will be testing the final releases of SBS 2011 in our labs as they become available.

Well the summer appears to have been and gone, but in that time we’ve been very busy!

• We welcome our newest staff member Hannah, who joins us for her year-in-industry placement to provide additional tech support and to help us with our refurbishment project.

• We completed a medium sized SBS 2008 installation at a local Exeter school, providing web filtering, group policy work and remote access.

• Our software development work with Exeter University continues, with the university wide release of an improved system for managing their staff recruitment process.

• We’ve taken in some more end-of-life kit from an Exeter school, which we will be refurbishing and releasing to charity

We’ll be changing the format of the blog shortly, and do a general revamp of all our websites, so watch this space!

In other news

The Small Business Server ‘Aurora’ beta has been released, which we’re evaluating right now. It incorporates features from Windows Home Server (such as drive extending, client workstation backups etc), whilst maintaining the SBS featureset. It’s also the first product to include cloud technology features, though those remain to be detailed (but likely to be some sort of remote file storage system)