Specialized Windows Server Editions

As with the Windows client, Microsoft has created a number of specialized editions of Windows Server to address market niches, particularly niches where the standard Windows Server product’s price or footprint would impede its competitiveness. These include Windows Storage Server and the Compute Cluster Server (to be replaced by the Windows High-Performance Computing Server in 2008).

Windows Storage Server and Unified Data Storage Server are OEM-only editions of Windows Server for storage, file, and print servers. OEMs ship Storage Server on devices ranging from low-end file servers to storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Storage Server has some unique features, such as single-instance storage, which eliminates duplicate files to reduce storage requirements. Storage Server also excludes many Windows services to simplify software maintenance. Although Storage Server is supported exclusively by OEMs, it follows Microsoft’s normal support life cycle for enterprise products; a given version of Windows Storage Server will be fully supported for at least five years, with an additional five years of paid support available after that.