Windows Server Standard 2012 R2, 64-bit, 2 CPU / 2 VM, OEM

Windows Server 2012 R2

What’s new in 2012 R2, the series

In this nine-part series, Brad Anderson, corporate VP of program management for Windows Server and System Center, covers the improved features in the 2012 R2 wave of server products and services across key cloud-first pillars, including people-centric IT, transforming the datacenter, and enabling modern business apps.

Transform the datacenter

Respond to changing business needs with the power of a hybrid cloud infrastructure from Microsoft.

• Today's business runs on IT
• Datacenter without boundaries
• Cloud innovation everywhere
• Dynamic application delivery

Today's business runs on IT

The datacenter is the hub for everything you offer the business, all the storage, networking and computing capacity. You need to be able to take everything you know and own today and transform those resources into a datacenter that is capable of handling changing needs and unexpected opportunities.

With Microsoft technologies, you can transform the datacenter. You can take the big, complicated, heterogeneous infrastructure you have today and bring it forward into the cloud to take advantage of the boundless capacity the cloud offers, while still meeting requirements for security and compliance. You can reduce cost and complexity with technology innovation in storage and networking and deliver services to the business faster.

Datacenter without boundaries

IT is under pressure to deliver more without spending more. Everything just has to work. So how do you meet those needs?

The power of software transforms diverse platforms into a single entity that you can manage as a whole. And that lets you balance the demands of all the different areas of the business, moving resources to the places where you need them most.

Once you have your datacenter running like a well-oiled machine, think about the places you still need some room to grow. That’s where you can extend into the cloud. You can meet unexpected demands or plan ahead for the seasons or days when your business runs at top speed. The economies of cloud work for you, because you only pay for what you need. And you can access resources without long delays or major capital expenditures.

Microsoft offers you a consistent experience that takes you from your datacenter to the cloud and back. Move workloads with maximum flexibility. Scale up or scale down based on your specific business needs.

Cloud innovation everywhere

Innovation is a pretty common term in the world of technology. The key is figuring out which new things are actually going to make a difference in how you solve problems. Microsoft’s experience running the massive scale deployments of Bing, Xbox, and Office 365 has shown us first-hand how cloud innovation can transform the datacenter. In our datacenter and cloud offerings, you’ll find innovation that can help you address real-world issues.

Today, some of the best options for simplifying the datacenter exist in storage. In the datacenter, Microsoft lets you use commodity hardware in a flexible, low-cost configuration that integrates well with your existing resources. And in the cloud, you can take advantage of boundless capacity and smart hybrid models.

Nothing is more important to a hybrid cloud than the right connections and Microsoft offers the flexibility to move applications across clouds without networking changes.

With network virtualization, you can separate business groups or create boundaries that allow you to manage resources more effectively.

Finally, you need to offer access to key resources wherever they are located without compromising security. Microsoft’s access and information protection solutions give you the control you need to manage access without creating barriers.

The bottom line: cloud innovation lets you streamline and simplify.

Dynamic application delivery

How does IT get faster?

A big part of IT’s responsibility is projecting into the future and preparing for multiple possibilities. Automation allows you to deliver applications faster, and respond to increasing demands on those applications.

With Microsoft, you can automate how applications are provisioned and deployed, and even create self-service options. Self-service allows you to maintain control of crucial decisions while still offering easy access to people who need resources.

Once the application is deployed, Microsoft’s management tools let you monitor performance and respond to problems without constantly watching a console. You can even diagnose issues in the application, right down to the individual line of code. Make IT a strategic partner to the business, with the speed and agility to deliver.

Telefónica

Telco giant uses hybrid-cloud strategy to trim IT costs by 15%, gain agility

Telefónica, one of the world’s largest telecommunications providers, is making sweeping changes in how it delivers IT services to the business. It is using a hybrid private-public cloud strategy based on Microsoft software to reduce IT costs by 15%, ramp up business agility, and increase data center flexibility and reliability. Its private cloud, based on Windows Server 2012 with the Hyper-V technology, is the cornerstone of a new Tier 4 Madrid data center. There, it will consolidate 18,000 physical servers across Europe to just 6,000 physical servers. Soon, it will link this private cloud to Windows Azure, the Microsoft public cloud service, to give the business tremendous flexibility in where it runs its IT workloads. With a hybrid-cloud strategy, Telefónica can deliver IT services to the business in days instead of months and make them far more reliable.

Why Microsoft

From vendors that are applying new labels to old on-premises solutions to those that want you to rip up your existing infrastructure and bet everything on public cloud, there are a host of vendors claiming to solve all your IT challenges.

Microsoft’s solutions help you take advantage of your existing investments and move to the cloud at a pace that suits your business needs. Through proven solutions that help customers choose between private, public, or hybrid, you can be sure your IT infrastructure can adapt as the needs of your business change.

Unlock insights on any data

What can your data do for you?

Empower people with robust BI tools to get business insights faster and easier — all through the tools they use every day.

• Powerful, familiar tools to make BI accessible and engaging
• Easy access to data, big and small
• A complete data platform spanning on-premises and cloud

Data has a story to tell

With data being generated faster than ever before, you need tools to help you easily find this data and combine it with data from you own organization. Microsoft helps you easily find relevant data wherever it lives — in the confines of your business or from the cloud.

With business intelligence tools built right into Excel, and supercharged by a powerful back-end data platform in SQL Server, Microsoft makes it easier for everyone to discover new insights and uncover new connections and relationships across data sets.

Powerful, familiar tools to make BI accessible and engaging

Data is growing faster than ever before. The days of having to worry about what data is kept and stored and having to put it through lengthy IT cleansing processes is over. Now it’s about mining through mountains of data – often of different types and in real time. As the amount of available data increases, how can people best use this for their needs — whether that’s looking for new business opportunities, finding competitive differentiators, or just keeping operations running smoothly?

Microsoft business intelligence solutions are designed to help people go from idea to insight quickly. From BI in Excel to more advanced analytics in SQL Server, Microsoft covers the entire spectrum of data analysis needs—all with a familiar set of tools that don’t require people to learn new ways of doing things. People can create their own reports in Excel and take advantage of advanced capabilities that had previously been locked behind complex and hard-to-use tools.

Now people can create stunning, interactive views from any data using Excel 2013 — all without writing any code. And business meetings can be even more productive when people can present and make real-time decisions using interactive charts and reports that can be changed on the fly directly in PowerPoint. Share and collaborate with other people by using SharePoint while retaining the rich data-linked visualizations that were built in Excel.

Easy access to data, big and small

Building data warehousing solutions for analytics can be difficult and costly — often with an analytics solution that's outdated before it's even released. With more data than ever being generated more quickly than ever, businesses don't have time for lengthy projects.

The good news is, you can count on Microsoft tools to work together and scale seamlessly — whether you're looking at small data in Excel or a multi-petabyte data warehouse. You can easily transition from running simple queries in Excel to connecting to managed reports available through SharePoint.

A complete data platform

Data science and other analytics follow a common path to getting an answer. First, you identify and form your questions. Then you find and combine the available data, often from multiple sources, and run analyses. And often, you run this question-to-answer process multiple times. For organizations to get the most competitive edge, it's often about getting meaningful results quickly.

Microsoft's complete and unified data platform allows IT to leverage existing skills and rapidly develop powerful data-driven solutions giving them the technical agility to focus on what matters most to the business. Microsoft offers this in a familiar and robust database solution—SQL Server, bolstered by a rich set of complementary and powerful technologies connected to the cloud in Windows Azure. With Microsoft, IT has robust tools to handle virtually any data-driven problem.

And for applications, Microsoft's "any-data, anywhere" approach lets developers work seamlessly with any data regardless of type, structure or location without having to worry about scale, performance, security or availability. It's easy for developers to take advantage of Microsoft's complete data platform with data management tools and support for data manipulation, including relational, non-relational and streaming, through tools like Visual Studio. In fact, IT can also build and run data-driven applications using on-premises software or Windows Azure.

Great Western Bank

Fast-growing bank gains customers and maximizes profits with Microsoft BI tools

To support ambitious growth plans, Great Western Bank needed to increase profitability, simplify compliance, and gain better insight into customer relationships. The bank deployed a Microsoft data warehouse and business intelligence solution because of previous success in building an extremely complex system with the technology.

Why Microsoft

There are plenty of vendors who claim to meet your big data needs, but their solutions are not usually designed to handle today’s new data sources or built to take full advantage of the cloud. Some try to sell you on complex, expensive hardware solutions that are difficult to use while others provide limited data visualization solutions that address only one issue at a time. See how Microsoft offers a complete, flexible data platform that helps everyone at businesses like yours, from the front office to the server room, unlock insights from any data, big and small, no matter where it resides.

Empower people-centric IT

People-centric IT (PCIT) enables each person you support to work from virtually anywhere on the device of their choice and gives you a consistent way to manage and protect it all. Microsoft PCIT solutions allow you to:

• Keep end users productive
• Help with data protection and compliance
• Unify user and device management

Expectations of technology and IT are changing

The lines between personal life and work are blurring, and the people you support want a consistent and personalized experience no matter what device they’re using.

Supporting many PCs, devices, and apps can be expensive and can tie up IT with 24/7 management, not to mention the risk to the security of your company’s assets and information.

Microsoft’s approach helps IT offer a consistent self-service experience for people, their PCs, and their devices while ensuring security. You can manage all your clients’ devices in a single tool while reducing costs and simplifying management. Best of all, you can leverage your existing tools and infrastructure.

Keeping end users productive

The consumerization of IT remains a top challenge for many businesses.

More and more people have multiple connected devices they use in their working day. A typical worker might have a PC, a tablet, and a smartphone and expects to use any or all of these devices to do their job. Even when the device is their own.

It falls to IT to help these users have a great, consistent experience, regardless of the device they’re using.

Helping with data protection and compliance

Protecting company information is a critical task for all IT departments and is only made more challenging with the growth of BYOD trends. Users working from personal devices, still need access to sensitive information to do their jobs. IT needs to balance access with meeting security and regulatory compliance standards across all devices.

PCIT helps IT to protect corporate data by helping to define classification of data based on content and not just location. It creates policy-based access control, creating user identities to access resources on-premises or in the cloud. And PCIT enables IT to selectively wipe applications and information from devices, as necessary.

Unify user and device management

Supporting end user devices and PCs can drive up costs.

There are lots of solutions for managing PCs. And lots of solutions for managing mobile devices. But in most cases, IT needs to invest in more than one tool to manage these different devices, adding extra cost and complexity.

That’s where we’re different.

Microsoft’s solution is people-centric, meaning we start with the individual. Then we give IT the power and flexibility to manage that person based on their profile, tailored to the device they’re using, and taking into account how the user is connecting.

Finally, we provide all of this in an integrated solution, through a single management console. This often builds on the IT investments you’ve already made, and enables IT to manage the devices in the most effective way — whether on site or from the cloud.

Productive users. Secure data and devices. Reduced cost and complexity. That’s people-centric IT.

What powers people-centric IT with Cloud OS?

We have a range of tools for IT pros across System Center and Windows Intune to deliver applications to your client. Windows Server 2012 supports new capabilities that give seamless remote access to apps and data, from the network layer with DirectAccess, all the way up to full application and desktop remoting through VDI.

Toyota

Automotive retailer avoids $1.3 million in IT costs with cloud-based PC management tool

Toyota Motor Europe (TME) had no tools to manage 3,500 car-diagnostic PCs running outside the corporate domain at 3,000 dealerships. TME chose Windows Intune to manage the PCs remotely from a web-based console. It can standardize software deployments to ensure consistent customer service and enhance the security of managed computers to reduce downtime at dealerships. Remote assistance capabilities will also help reduce on-site support costs.

Enable modern business applications

Today innovations across devices, data, and the cloud are driving a revolution in applications. Modernize your business applications in partnership with Microsoft.

• Reach any device
• Deliver mission critical performance
• Extend to the cloud
• Develop applications faster

Embrace the revolution in an evolutionary way

Customers are accessing applications on smart devices of all types; in their work and personal lives.

Volume of data is increasing ten-fold every five years and applications that harness this data can deliver great business insights.

Applications are increasingly being delivered from the cloud, as businesses strive to reach more customers, more quickly and economically.

You can’t afford to ignore this application revolution, while your competitors capitalize on it.

You also don’t want to start over—given existing investments in tools and resources.Embrace the application revolution across devices, cloud and data in an evolutionary way and move your business forward… with Microsoft.

Reach any device

Microsoft can help you reach the broadest number of devices and get to market faster, with a common development tools and unified mobile backend that supports Windows, iOS and Android.

Microsoft development tools enable development teams to develop and deliver new modern applications that leverage the next wave in Windows platform innovation (Windows 8.1), while supporting devices and services across all Microsoft platforms. Windows Azure Mobile Services make it fast and easy to build mobile apps that scale. Within minutes, you can store data in the cloud, authenticate users, and push notifications to millions of devices.

Develop applications faster

Microsoft’s technologies enable you to develop, test, and deploy application faster, at reduced cost, and with the flexibility to deploy in the cloud or on-premises. Prototyping new ideas can be handled rapidly, as Windows Azure cloud services provide you all resources needed in minutes with instant provisioning, globally if you need it.

Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools remove barriers between business stakeholders, development teams, testing, and operations, to help you deliver high-quality software with greater control.

Deliver mission critical performance

With Microsoft's comprehensive data platform you can process any data at scale, deliver insights with a comprehensive and familiar platform, and enjoy leading-edge performance with in-memory solutions across all workloads. Microsoft enables you to process, and analyze relational or non-relational data, structured and unstructured data, across any location: on-premises, cloud or hybrid.

Extend to the cloud

Experience the economic benefits of the cloud and get to market faster with an open and flexible platform that enables you to quickly add new functionalities and extend your existing applications with cloud services.

Windows Azure enables you to bring together all your applications, data, devices, and partners, both on-premises and in the cloud. Use the flexible toolset for solving integration needs ranging from connecting mobile apps with on-premises Line of Business systems or applications.

Aviva Drive

UK insurance firm uses mobile application and cloud platform to track driving behavior

Aviva, a leading provider of financial services worldwide, wanted to help customers save money by basing auto insurance quotes on the behavior of individual drivers instead of statistics. To better understand potential customers, Aviva needed to collect telematics data from moving vehicles. However, deploying on-premises infrastructure was too costly and complex. That changed when it implemented a hybrid-cloud solution based on Windows Azure. The solution uses smartphones to collect telematics data that it stores in the cloud on Windows Azure SQL Database.