Well, I’m fresh back from Microsoft Ignite 2016. It was a busy week of attending sessions and booth duty for Nutanix :). Here is a summary of highlights and pics from the conference. I plan on diving deep into each of the major highlights over the coming weeksmonths. My first blog post will be on Storage Spaces Direct and its evolution. On to the updates…
Fun and crazy days here at Nutanix. I’ve busy been fielding a lot of calls around our new offering, CPS Standard on Nutanix. Now if you don’t know what CPS is, it stands for Cloud Platform System.
In today’s IT, there are a lot of discussions about different terms like PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS. So what do all of these cloud acronyms mean?
I’m going to give you the simplest explanation I can, to help you understand the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS.
Hi All, its Rob again and I decided to write a series on Azure Cloud. Since Azure Stack is months away from GA, its good to understand Azure Cloud for a few reasons. The API is the consistent across Azure Cloud and Azure Stack. And building a hybrid environment is the future for IT to use features like DR, Application Portability and Backup.
Change is in the air! I know that phrase is associated with spring, but I love the change of seasons, especially, winter, when days get shorter and I get to spend time in the snow with my kids. Every winter, I think I can rely on the patterns from the seasons before, but I quickly find I have to adapt to a new reality. For example, I live near Boston and just when I thought we would have a mild winter, mother nature strikes. One week its 50’s and the next we are in the middle of a blizzard. Changes and transformations are just another fact of life.
The Exchange Server Role Requirement Calculator is your one stop calculation tool for Exchange 20132016 design. The tool covers design calculations for both the Mailbox and Client Access server role. Exchange 2013 reduced the number of roles from previous versions of Exchange by making the design and implementation as simple as possible and Exchange 2016 furthers that into a single role. The Server Role Requirement Calculator helps us to size virtually and it provides in-depth sizing of every component of the hardware like CPU, Memory, Network, Storage, Backup, servers, datacenter etc.
Exchange Server 2016 is here and available to download!!!
What sets this version of Exchange apart from the past, is that it was forged in the cloud. This release brings the Exchange bits that already power millions of Office 365 mailboxes to your on-premises environment. And deploying Exchange 2016 on Nutanix, you can truly create the ultimate email web-scale environment.
Email remains the backbone of business communication and the one that workers consider the most essential tool for getting things done. Because of this, it’s vital to have a modern messaging infrastructure that meets today’s business expectations of scale. With the volume of email and other communications continuing to grow, people need tools that help them focus on what’s most important in their inboxes, schedules and interactions with others at work. And as the quantity of email data grows, so do the demands on IT to manage, preserve and protect it. This is why Web-Scale so important in an Exchange 2016 environment.
Web-Scale Fundamentals
To help you meet these challenges with Exchange Server, Microsoft has deepened the integration between Exchange and other Office products, so your organization can be more productive and collaborate more effectively. They’ve made it easier to manage your email with new ways to focus on what’s important, work more efficiently, and accomplish more with your devices. Microsoft has also simplified the Exchange architecture and introduced additional recovery features.
Exchange 2016 builds on and improves features introduced in Exchange 2013, including Data Loss Prevention, Managed Availability, automatic recovery from storage failures, and the web-based Exchange admin center.
That’s just quick list of highlights; I encourage you to get a full view of what’s new by reviewing the Exchange 2016 documentation on TechNet.
Or, if you are in the mood for something more bite-sized, check out these short demo videos in which a few members of the Exchange team show off their favorite features:
Exchange 2016 will follow the same servicing rhythm as Exchange 2013, with Cumulative Updates (CUs) released approximately every three months that contain bug fixes, product refinements, and selected new investments from Office 365. The first CU is expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2016.
Until next time, Rob….
Identity is always something of a taboo subject and is still not clearly understood out there and the IT security landscape keeps evolving.
One of the recent changes past few years is a move away from (Access Control Lists) ACLs on files in the NTFS file system to an access control system that is based on claims.
Claims based authentication is an industry standard security protocol to authenticate users. This is the underlying WS-* standards that describe the usage of Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) tokens. Claims based auth requires these tokens, and by extension an entity that can issue the token.
This is the Secure Token Service (STS). The STS server can be based on Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or other platforms that provide this service. This is where ADFS comes in and the highlight of this series.
