Everyone's heard about the controversial Windows 8 desktop, with its nifty tablet-centric focus and support of an array of new hardware, but its sibling OS, Windows Server 2012, 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? Server 2012 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 2012 delivers that to file servers under SMB 3.0. <br /> <br /> But while we're on the subject of file servers, Server 2012's sort of an early Christmas in that department. You can buy a bushel of $25 Ethernet cards and Server 2012 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 2012 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 latest version of Server. The earlier you start learning about Server 2012, the sooner you can start planning to exploit what it can do for you -- and who better to explain it than Mark?