Server 2012 - Top 10 features
Server 2012 comes with some great new features. It also refines previous versions of Server to bring it up to parity, in features and stability, with competing offerings. In short Windows Server 2012 kicks ass. Here are the top 10 reasons why. 1. SMB 3.0 SMB 3.0 is the crown jewel of Server 2012. It is far removed from its laughingstock predecessor CIFS . It supports multiple simultaneous network interfaces – including the ability to hot-plug new interfaces on the fly to increase bandwidth for large or complex transfers – and supports MPIO, thin provisioning of volumes and reduplication (assuming the underlying storage is NTFS). SMB 3.0 also supports SMB Direct and remote direct memory access, the ability for appropriately kitted systems to move SMB data directly from one system's memory to the other, bypassing the SMB stack. This has enabled Microsoft to hit 16GBps transfer rates for SMB 3.0, a weighty gauntlet for any potential challenger to rise.