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Posted By Kevin DallasGeneral Manager
It’s been an incredibly productive autumn so far for us at Windows Embedded. The past few weeks have seen multiple major product and program announcements — the release of Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry, closely followed by its availability through volume licensing; Windows Server 2012 R2 for Embedded Systems’ general availability; and some really exciting changes to our partner program. You can bet we’ve been quite focused.
But after weeks of concerted effort, it’s good to pause and take a realistic look at the true progress we’re making in the industry. The Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving at breakneck speed; what role are Microsoft and Windows Embedded playing in that evolution? As early pioneers in this technology, evidence traditionally shows that Microsoft is leading the charge — and we’re not waiting for others to catch up.
That’s why I read with great interest Gartner’s just-released “SWOT” analysis of Microsoft’s position in the IoT space...
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Comments Internet of Things
Posted By Colin MurphyTechnical Product Manager
What a great question! Just getting started is one of the hardest steps in a device-development scenario because there are just too many questions to answer all at once. I like to break it down into more manageable steps. If you’re just starting out developing with Windows Embedded, here are some foundational steps you can go through for a small-footprint (Compact) device.
Comments Windows Embedded Compact
Posted By David WursterGroup Product Marketing Manager
Today, Microsoft takes another step as part of our commitment to helping enterprises harness the power of Windows 8.1 through intelligent systems. We first announced in July a new Volume Licensing program that allows enterprises to access specific versions of Windows Embedded 8 directly from Microsoft. Today, we extend that program to versions of Windows Embedded 8.1.
Comments Product Updates
Posted By Partha SrinivasanProduct Manager, Windows Embedded Server and SQL Products
In my last blog, I covered how Windows Embedded Server-based server appliances are used in the retail industry as in-store servers to generate business intelligence; in this blog, we will see how server appliances are used in the manufacturing industry, specifically in industrial automation, in roles such as historian servers, and application controllers that can improve productivity, asset utilization and operational efficiencies.
With historian server appliances based on the Windows Embedded Server platform, industrial manufacturing plants can gain valuable information by connecting and analyzing historical and ongoing process data generated from the plant. Both archiving and plant-wide accessing in real-time enable rapid decision making based on assured data – producing greater productivity and lower costs, thanks to improved business intelligence. The meaningful consolidation and aggregation of data into valuable information can enable dynamic reporting, such as downtime reports, alarm summaries for maintenance purposes, consumption data and energy balances, and efficiency reports of the different production lines. Combined with Microsoft SQL Server, database management systems provide a reliable and protected database platform for historian server appliances.
Today Windows Server 2012 R2 for Embedded Systems becomes generally available.
We think this is going to become the product for purpose-built, next-generation, enterprise class server appliances. With this edition, enterprises and OEMs now have a lot more capabilities and a host of improvements they can leverage to enhance performance, save space and ensure nearly constant uptime.
For one thing, we’ve substantially improved the product’s virtualization capabilities. This is good news for OEMs in particular, who have been utilizing virtualization to consolidate the physical architecture of their solutions and improve the ROI of their products.
R2 also features a host of upgrades designed to improve performance in a day-to-day, real-world way. The time it takes to complete a live migration has been cut in half. We’ve increased data transfer rates to 10 gigabits per second, greatly enhancing speed. We’ve also added support for USB access in guess VMs, making it easier to perform software deployment and file management. These improvements will enable OEMs to offer better products to support real world scenarios where optimized load balancing and live migration are critical.
The combination of those two areas means that not only can you run a smaller number of server appliances, but you can do so at a higher capacity. This should result in some really interesting scenarios for operating high-performance solutions in reduced-space environments. Already we’ve seen our customer Lufthansa Systems develop a small-footprint server appliance for use in airplanes, to facilitate in-flight entertainment.
Comments Intelligent Systems