AppFabric Blog

Birthdays are always special and we wanted to take this moment to celebrate the birthday of a special product. This week we are celebrating the birthday of Windows Server 2012. The product has done really well in the market and has super human strength. So here’s a question for you, “If Windows Server 2012 were a superhero, who would it be?”

In celebration of kids heading back to school, today we’re providing advance notification for the release of 14 bulletins, four Critical and 10 Important, for September 2013. The Critical updates address issues in Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint and Windows. 

A frustrating reality for IT leaders is that their teams continue to struggle with the complications of data growth even though they spend more money on storage every year. It’s not surprising that IT leaders are looking for new storage architectures to help them solve their scalability problems and reduce their costs. A post to this blog in June briefly discussed the problems customers are having with data growth and mentioned how a StorSimple Cloud-integrated Storage system could be used to alleviate them. This post expands on that conversation and introduces the Microsoft hybrid cloud storage solution.  

By now, readers of this blog may have already heard of our presence at VMworld in San Francisco this week. As you can imagine, planning a “guerrilla” activity is never a trivial task, and making it happen requires a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Therefore, I was feeling pretty pleased with what our team had managed to organize as I boarded my flight for San Francisco early Monday morning. Add to this the fact that I was visiting the Bay Area, a place that I called home for seven memorable years – I was really looking forward to the trip.  

VMworld kicks off this week in San Francisco. I happen to know a few loyal VMware IT professionals, and the event is clearly a very exciting time of the year for them - an opportunity to meet other fellow enthusiasts, as well as to learn more about new releases from VMware. But I wonder if they would ever expect to learn more about Microsoft technologies such as Hyper-V and System Center while attending the event. Well, that’s what we’re going to make happen this year, albeit a little creatively.

​I have mentioned in a previous blog that the use of the right-to-left-override (U+202E) unicode character is nothing new. This blog also went on to show the various file name tricks used by malware.

Today we’re publishing the August 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page.  We fielded 13 questions on various topics during the webcast, with specific bulletin questions focusing primarily on Exchange Server (MS13-061) and Windows Kernel (MS13-063).  There were 3 additional questions during the webcast that we were unable to answer on air, and we have also answered those on the Q&A page.

Today we are pleased to make several important announcements. We are extremely excited that on October 18^th, eligible customers will able to download Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and use the latest update to Windows Intune.  Also on October 18^th, Windows 8.1 will be available to consumers and businesses worldwide. To find out more about this announcement, see Microsoft Vice President, Brad Anderson's blog, "Mark Your Calendars for October 18th, the R2 Wave is Coming".  While you’re there, be sure to also check out his special series on “What’s New in 2012 R2” for a deep dive on all the new innovations to expect in the R2 wave of products.