Sun Microsystems providing service and support for EBS on one physical server

Sun Microsystems is marketing Windows EBS Standard as virtualized on one physical server.  Sun Microsystems has published a Sun for Windows EBS Solution Brief and Microsoft Windows EBS on Sun Microsystems x64 Systems Hardware Requirements.

From Sun's Place for Small and Medium Businesses site:

 

Our Solution: EBS on Sun

Instead of the three servers required by other platforms, Sun enables you to manage your entire Windows environment with one affordable, virtualized, and massively scalable system.

• Sun Fire X4150 or X4250 servers: Featuring Intel Xeon dual- or quad-core processors, our servers provide exceptional performance in a compact, energy-efficient package.
• J4200 storage arrays: Each array supports up to 16 fast SAS or high-capacity SATA or high-capacity SATA disk drives and a built-in capacity of more than 2 TB.
• Supported configuration: Microsoft, a Sun technology partner, has validated our integrated software, hardware, and storage solution for EBS on Sun.

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Key Benefits

Lower your total cost of ownership with Sun's cost-efficient, compact and eco-friendly EBS solution.
Why strain your IT budget when one powerful Sun server can do the work of three? With EBS on Sun, you could:

• Save 84% in energy costs over three years.
• Realize overall savings of 10% per year.
• Reduce the footprint of your EBS solution in the data center by 50%.

Meet the surging demands of your business and employees.
Our solution scales easily as your business grows, enabling you to:

• Manage a Windows environment with up to 300 concurrent users.
• Add more storage quickly with Sun Storage arrays that reduce storage costs to about $1 per gigabyte.
• Run EBS with just one virtualized Sun server instead of the three physical servers required by other platforms.

Increase your IT professionals' efficiency and productivity—and their peace of mind.
EBS on Sun dramatically reduces IT complexity by combining management, messaging, and security software in one integrated solution. Sun's reference configurations and Microsoft's best practices for small and mid-sized businesses make EBS simple for IT specialists to deploy and maintain.

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Service and Support

Get the assistance you need when you need it: Sun's award-winning service and support helps keep your systems running.

EBS is gaining market traction

I am seeing EBS gaining traction in the market.  I expected sales to pick-up in January and February, following the holiday season and at the beginning of many fiscal years.  Whether credit is opening up in some markets or customers are leveraging SmartPay promotion from Microsoft or other credit offered by Microsoft Finance for software, hardware and services, I am optimistic that the first full week in January is an indicator for the next few months.  The market is confirming the value of EBS, where increased productivity and lower TCO are essential especially in today's global economy.    Here is an article from CIO Insight on IT Productivity.  Is this book worth the read?

Where is EBS on the technology adoption life cycle (TALC)? EBS is currently establishing the beach head and preparing for the tornado effect.  Where do you want to be on the EBS TALC?

EBS Myths

This quick, impromptu, 5-minutes video informally discusses a few myths of Windows Essential Business Server (EBS). Please let me know topics you may be interested in and who you want me to interview in the future.

First thing Monday morning without coffee, ugh.

Congratulations for our first two EBS MVPs

Amy Babinchak (US) and Oliver Sommer (Germany) are the first two EBS MVPs.

Congratulations!

Midmarket IT Pros more familiar with EBS 2008 than Hyper-V in a recent study

Midmarket IT Pros are more familiar with EBS 2008 than Hyper-V in the U.S. and China.  These midmarket IT Pros were interviewed as part of a Microsoft Dynamics study published internal to Microsoft in December 2008.  These findings are decent, considering EBS's time in market, marketing budget & resources (Where are EBS robot ads?) and interest in virtualization.  Since more than 1/3 of the IT Pros interviewed were outside of EBS's total addressable market, EBS would have surpassed Hyper-V and other Microsoft products in more geographies if IT Pros interviewed were limited to EBS's addressable market.  While IT Pros may be familiar, this study did not measure IT Pros' perception of EBS, e.g. unique business value, Administration Console, lower total cost of ownership, increased productivity (IT Pro and end-user), 300-pages of best practices, etc.

Low budget EBS v1 of IT 24-7

EBS v1 mod 1 IT 24-7 with a tattoo

Messaging Guidance and Analysis

If you are a Microsoft employee, I posted valuable EBS messaging information on my internal blog.  A recent study in the U.S., U.K. and Germany verifies IT Pro pain points, but also includes an unexpected takeaway.

MS Partners may find some of this information valuable for business development, so if you are interested, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.  They should be able to provide you relevant, releasable information.   If there is enough interest, I may provide worldwide partner information.

Windows Server 2008 in EBS. "Windows Server 2008 is everything that IT buyers asked for"

 

Windows Server 2008: Windows also rises

While Vista crashed and burned, Microsoft's new server OS became the upgrade Windows shops can't refuse

By Doug Dineley

December 26, 2008

"The advances beyond Windows Server 2003 seem too numerous to count."