Windows Server development projects usually go through a common sequence of stages with a corresponding set of artifacts for the resulting app or service, and for each of them there is a standard set of best practices:

The works of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, have helped Microsoft to patch a significant security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows existing versions. It was found out that the attacker can exploit this vulnerability to pass as a WPAD or ISATAP server and redirect all the victim’s network traffic through a point controlled by the attacker. Network traffic here means not just Web HTTP and HTTPS, but also OS updates, software upgrades, Certificate Revocation List updates via Microsoft’s Crypto API, and other OS maintenance operations.

Microsoft has created its own edition of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. As Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center says, “Redmond took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”.

Micron has announced its first 3D NAND SSDs, triple-level cell (3bits/cell) 1100 and 2200 products. The 1100 is a 6Gbit/s SATA product coming in 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA formats in 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB and 2048GB (2.5-inch only) capacity points, it uses 32-layer TLC NAND with 384Gb dice.

Citrix has revealed a desktop thin client based on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer – HDX Ready Pi, which is a Citrix-built box containing the Raspberry Pi 3 hardware and a ViewSonic Linux build designed specifically to run with the Citrix HDX virtual desktop platform. The device contains a Raspberry Pi 3 board, a power supply and ports for the Pi’s HDMI, ethernet and USB connections. It connects to a XenDesktop and XenApp server that hosts the virtual instances of each individual PC.

Solid-State-Drives are becoming widely implemented in ESXi hosts for caching (vFlash Read Cache, PernixData FVP), Virtual SAN or plain Datastores. Unfortunately, SSDs have limited lifetime per cell. Its value may range from 1.000 times in consumer TLC SSDs up to 100.000 times in enterprise SLC based SSDs. Lifetime can be estimated by device TBW parameters provided by vendor in its specification, It describes how many Terabytes can be written to the entire device, until the warranty expires.

Nano Server is a headless, remotely managed version of its server product that comes as a separate installation option in Windows Server 2016, which is in Technical Preview 5 at the moment, but is thought to represent the final feature version before RTM.

As we know, Backblaze publishes the specifications its product – Storage Pods, and recently it has announced its sixth generation design, with the number of disks rising from 45 to 60 while reducing costs down even further.

SanDisk is one of few companies currently offering 1TB of storage in a single-sided M.2 card – its product X400 SSD. X400 also comes in a 2.5″ 7mm-height form factor, but the M.2 configuration is the main selling point of this line. 1TB M.2 X400 card allows getting the most out of the ultra-thin notebooks in terms of storage, without sacrificing performance or battery life.