One of the greatest benefits of Microsoft technologies is support from the Microsoft eco-system. Microsoft partners, such as Dell, HP, NEC, and Unisys, have developed solutions that work with the high-end editions of Windows Server.
Specifically, there are two programs with Microsoft OEM Partners that showcase the high-end editions of Windows Server 2008:
Windows Server 2008 High Availability Program: The program provides highly available solutions for business-critical workloads and large-scale virtualization by combining hardware that contains redundant components and the latest reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) technologies, high-end editions of Windows Server, end-to-end testing including only signed drivers, proactive change management best practices, and reactive support from OEMs covering the hardware and operating system with escalations to dedicated Microsoft support engineers.
Failover Clustering Configuration Program: The Microsoft strategy is to work with partners to provide clustered solutions that are built with industry standard commodity–based components that deliver high availability for the complete range of businesses—from small and medium business needs to enterprise-class applications. This enables you to use the same build-to-order model from Dell or out-of-the-box solutions from HP, NEC, Unisys, or others to achieve minimal downtime.
In addition to these two programs, we are also happy to have our key OEM partners focused on delivering solutions that are based on other advanced capabilities of Windows Server 2008, such as Dynamic Hardware Partitioning. Dynamic Hardware Partitioning, available in Windows Server 2008 Data Center and Itanium Editions, takes advantage of enterprise servers that provide advanced partitioning capability to deliver new levels of growth and availability. OEMs, such as NEC, have worked closely with Microsoft to deliver hot-addition and hot-replacement of processing resources without the loss of operating system or application state, to deliver continuous scalability and availability solutions for business-critical workloads.
