14 DAY TRIAL // The beginning of 2008 is without a doubt synonymous with Microsoft's interoperability drive. And the Redmond company seems to be committed to continually investing in this newly found direction, making yet another step toward the interoperability altering together with Sun. On March 10, the two companies inaugurated the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on the Redmond campus. At the same time with the opening of the center dedicated to making Microsoft applications play well on the Sun Fire x64 server systems storage, the parties also married Exchange Server 2007 and the dedicated Sun Infrastructure Solution.
"Our customers and partners want to maximize their business efficiency, and we are helping them do that by opening the new Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing at Microsoft. "The center will provide a setting for hands-on testing and tuning of Sun/Microsoft solutions, and will help our joint customers achieve outstanding performance results for their standardized and homegrown solutions. It is consistent with our recently announced interoperability principles, which guide steps that we are taking to enhance interoperability in the marketplace for the benefit of customers."
The Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center will focus not only on building interoperability solutions, but also on benchmarking, tweaking and finely tunning them. This is why customers will be able to access demonstrations of the interoperability of Windows Server 2008 on Sun x64 systems and storage, and will even be permitted to run test scenarios. Virtualization is yet another area of interoperability dealt with at the new Center. Microsoft and Sun essentially want to enable cross-platform server virtualization bridging Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with Sun xVM.
"The new Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center will help provide our joint customers with a testbed for running key Microsoft applications on Sun's x64 servers and help ensure more seamless integration between the technologies," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Additionally, with the new Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Sun's expertise in x64 servers, storage and 64-bit database architectures will enable customers to significantly reduce e-mail TCO and ease the transition to the new 64-bit product."
Free trial versions of Windows Server 2008 SP1/RTM can be downloaded from here.