Tag: Vail

Feb 13 2011

Drive Extender Alternatives for Windows Home Server 2011

Last year, I covered the shock announcement that Microsoft was dropping the Drive Extender (DE) technology from its second version of Windows Home Server (formerly codenamed “Vail” but now dubbed Windows Home Server 2011). In a nutshell, DE provided some critical functionality including: storage pooling (the ability to combine multiple drives into one large storage …

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Dec 02 2010

HP Retires MediaSmart Server Line – Death Knell for Windows Home Server?

Windows Home Server “Vail” (the second version of Windows Home Server) slated for release by Microsoft next year already suffered a significant setback and subsequent public backlash last week after the announcement that its Drive Extender functionality was to be dropped. Drive Extender provided the very popular storage pooling and selective folder redundancy features found …

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Nov 24 2010

Windows Home Server – Vail is Fail After Abandoning Drive Extender

Windows Home Server Vail Fail

In a hark back to the flop of the Windows Vista “wow is now” campaign Microsoft has seemingly shot itself square in the foot by announcing that the second version of Drive Extender (or DE) technology from Windows Home Server was being dropped. For those of you wanting to know about the original Windows Home …

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Aug 18 2010

Windows Home Server V2 Beta Available

Just a quick one this evening. For those of you who are interested, Windows Home Server “Vail” (for home or home office use) and “Aurora” (for small business use) have been released on Microsoft Connect. What has really got me excited are some of the new features, specifically: the ability to natively backup MacOS X …

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May 01 2010

TPG Unlimited 24×7 – One Month On

A month ago, I wrote a blog entry regarding TPG’s introduction of their new ADSL2+ Unlimited 24×7 plan at selected exchanges. TPG is still rolling out the availability of this plan at exchanges as it requires the provisioning for suitable backhaul (presumably using the recently acquired PIPE as the, umm, pipe). So how did the …

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Apr 27 2010

Windows Home Server V2 – “Vail” Makes its Debut

After a period of expectancy, the next version of Windows Home Server has made its way to being released as a “public preview”. What this means is that the product is still very much in testing and many things may not work properly (or perhaps not at all). Codenamed “Vail”, Microsoft has unleashed this second …

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