Some hardware vendors such as Thecus have a Windows Storage Server 2016 licence on their NAS and with the release of Windows Storage Server 2016, will be re-releasing their hardware which will let you buy your own Windows Server 2016 licence and upgrade. Windows Storage Server 20 are Windows Storage but only separated in name only because it is sold exclusively through Microsoft’s hardware partners and bundled onboard with WSS NAS Hardware. However, in releases such as WSS 2016 and WSS 2012, there is no such disparity, and have no storage features beyond those found in every other edition of Windows Server. Early versions of Windows Storage server (such as WSS 2018) included a couple of additional software features such as Single Instance Storage (file deduplication) and the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target that differentiated it from Windows Server. Windows Storage Server is a version of Windows Server that’s licensed to OEMs such as Buffalo, Thecus and until recently Seagate, for use in network-attached storage appliances. Windows Storage Server 2016 delivers rock-solid SMB, NFS and iSCSI storage services easily and efficiently. New advancements in networking, such as RDMA, have catapulted Ethernet past FibreChannel in performance - and at a fraction of the deployment and management cost of a Storage Area Network (SAN). Performance and security gains in SMB from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2016, are more than double. One out of five Windows Servers have the File Server role and we know that many users chiefly use Server Message Block (SMB) and they use it extensively to share files. Windows NAS has been one of the key pillars of IT infrastructure for decades.

Windows Storage Server 2016 fully supports upgrades from previous versions, as well as Windows Storage Server manufacturers (such as Buffalo NAS and Thecus NAS) and application developers can evaluate the operating system using an MSDN subscription and all Windows Storage Server 2016 features can also be tested using Windows Server 2016 Standard.

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