Muglia Leads Off Week Two of Tech Ed
by Alex Woodie

The second week of TechEd 2008 kicked off in Orlando, Florida, yesterday when Microsoft server chief Bob Muglia delivered a keynote to 10,000 people attending the 'IT professionals' segment of the conference. Muglia centered his speech on the evolution of 'Dynamic IT,' Microsoft's multi-year, multi-product initiative to make it easier to manage computers and the applications that run on them, and unveiled enhancements to several Microsoft products in the areas of virtualization, security, identity management, and data management. Last week TechEd was a developer-oriented conference. READ MORE >

Fixes for Critical Security Flaws Issued by Microsoft
by Alex Woodie

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means that the cycle of life begins anew in the Microsoft TechNet Security division, which yesterday issued seven patches addressing 10 vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system and associated programs. Standouts from June's patch pack include a critical vulnerability in Windows' Bluetooth stack that could potentially enable drive-by hacking over wireless networks, another cumulative IE release, and an Active Directory flaw that will affect nearly every corporation. READ MORE >

New Windows Clustering Capability Has HA Partners Shifting Gears
by Alex Woodie

New multi-site clustering features in Windows Server 2008 is prompting Microsoft's partners to take a slightly different approach to serving the market for highly available Windows servers clusters. By overcoming a limitation that prevented customers from establishing disaster recovery clusters, vendors that previously filled this need must find something else to do, which Microsoft is encouraging with a new partner program expected to be announced at TechEd this week. READ MORE >

Stratus Builds Its First HA Clustering Product Atop Xen
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The age of virtualized servers is going to have some intended side effects on the server racket, and one of them is high availability clustering that is easier to use, more flexible in its deployment, and less costly than more tradition server clustering methods. While Stratus Technologies is one of the original upstarts of fault tolerant computing (along with Tandem, now a division of Hewlett-Packard), the company knows a broader HA opportunity when it sees it. And that is what the Avance virtualization-driven HA software product line announced this week is all about. READ MORE >