More of course to come on all of the different facets of networking that the new release touches.

As we say in the south, there are more storage improvements than you can shake a stick at in Windows Server 8. The Windows team has been closely working with cohorts at Microsoft Research to improve the efficiency for data storage. They've come across new de-duplication technologies -- kind of like Microsoft Exchange's single-instance storage -- that can reduce storage on any given volume by anywhere from 30% to 90%. This isn't compression; this is searching for like components of files and removing duplication across volumes.

In addition, clustering gets some new functionality around scale and manageability. Windows Server 8 supports an industry-best 4,000 VMs per cluster and can now scale out to a massive 63 nodes in a cluster. In addition, Microsoft has extended cluster-shared volumes to Windows server workloads and now supports BitLocker-based volume encryption for shared cluster disks.

And to shouts of glee from administrators everywhere, CHKDSK is not an all-day process anymore. CHKDSK repair now takes less than eight seconds on a volume, with one corruption among three hundred million files, compared with times measured in hours in Windows Server 2008 R2.