Everyone's heard about the upcoming Windows 8 desktop, with its nifty tablet-centric focus and support of an array of new hardware, but its sibling OS, Windows Server 8, may just be the bigger story. In a few words, you can think of it as the "high availability, low cost" version of Server. Tired of spending piles of money on proprietary SAN and networking devices? Windows 8 Storage lets you buy a pile of cheap, generic hardware, type a few PowerShell commands and you've got a pretty snazzy SAN device that you can manage with all of Windows' familiar tools, and at a lower cost. Want the peace of mind fault-tolerant clusters provide, but without their complexity and cost? Server 8 delivers that to file servers under SMB 2.2. <br /> <br /> But while we're on the subject of file servers, Server 8's sort of an early Christmas in that department. You can buy a bushel of $25 Ethernet cards and Server 8 will create the world's cheapest NIC team from them, letting you both aggregate bandwidth and survive NIC, cable or switch failure. And then there's the new kind of file server permissions ("Dynamic Access Control") that let you grant access only to people who are members of EVERY group on its permissions list, or based on Active Directory attributes and file keywords rather than group memberships. <br /> <br /> Of course, there's more to 8 than that. Massive changes to Hyper-V, super-cheap Hyper-V failover, an Active Directory without DCPROMO (but with something better), virtualization-friendly domain controllers, 2300 PowerShell cmdlets in-the-box and tons of other stuff. <br /> <br /> If this sounds intriguing, join Server expert Mark Minasi, author of the best-selling Mastering Windows Server series of books published for nearly the past 20 years for this in-depth guided tour of Microsoft's upcoming version of Server. The earlier you start learning about Server 8, the sooner you can start planning to exploit what it can do for you -- and who better to explain it than Mark? <br /> <br /> -- Get "the Cliff's Notes" on what's new and interesting in virtualization, networking, storage, security and identity from someone who's worked with Windows Server since 1993 <br /> <br /> -- Learn what new Server technologies could replace current "network appliances" at lower cost AND can be managed centrally with the Microsoft management tools you already know <br /> <br /> -- Use this short, fast and fun look at what's new in Server so you can better plan what OTHER talks to go to at this show! <br />