Microsoft Corp.’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer is kicking off more than 225 events around the world showcasing the company's next generation of infrastructure and application platform products, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

The company says these new enterprise products help customers more efficiently and securely manage their entire infrastructure and move to a virtualized environment while also delivering business intelligence and next-generation Web experiences.

The theme of the events, “Heroes Happen Here,” highlights the work that IT professionals, developers and partners do every day to create solutions and cutting-edge applications that keep global commerce and industry running.

IT professionals and developers tell us they spend too much time and money managing existing systems and not enough investing in new capabilities that create strategic advantage,” Ballmer said. “That feedback is at the core of the innovations in this new wave of products. Already, the overwhelming response from thousands of IT professionals and developers around the world is that this is the most secure enterprise platform we have ever delivered, and that it will simplify management and enable them to focus more on driving their businesses forward.”

A white paper detailing usage scenarios and providing more data on the impact of deploying Windows Server 2008 is available at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/product-information.aspx.

Already IT professionals and developers around the world are using Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and test versions of SQL Server 2008 to implement secure platforms and Web applications.

Geekzone is currently hosted on a Windows Server 2008 platform.

Windows Server 2008, including a beta version of the Hyper-V virtualization technology, and Visual Studio 2008 are available now. The feature-complete, February community technology preview of SQL Server 2008 is also available, with general availability expected in the third quarter of 2008.

Later this year Microsoft will release the Windows Essential Server Solutions family of products for small and midsize companies built on Windows Server 2008 and the newest Microsoft server technologies and services: Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008. Windows HPC Server 2008, the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, is on track for availability in the second half of 2008 and is designed to increase productivity, scalability and manageability for high-performance computing scenarios. In addition, Windows Storage Server 2008, the next-generation storage solution based on Windows Server 2008, will be available by the end of the year.

Microsoft disclosed new performance results on TPC-E and SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application 3-tier benchmarks running on four-socket industry-standard blade servers. Microsoft also published breakthrough performance benchmarks for several customer scenarios, including leading results on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Siemens Teamcenter and Camstar Manufacturing Execution Systems.

The company says that Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5 delivers faster throughput than IBM WebSphere 6.1 on Red Hat Linux as shown through two new benchmark tests measuring scalability and performance in mission-critical enterprise scenarios. The sample application shows 117 percent better throughput of Windows Server using the IBM-designed Trade 6.1 benchmark; and Sun Microsystems’ WSTest Web services benchmark demonstrates 94 percent better throughput on Windows Server when processing Web Service requests.



More information: http://www.heroeshappenhere.com...