Microsoft shows off Longhorn's hot swap

MICROSOFT SHOWED off one of its much touted features in Windows Longhorn, the ability to hot-swap components.

According to ComputerWorld, the Vole joined NEC and demonstrated a Longhorn software feature that will allow administrators to add and swap processors and storage devices.

What will hit the shops as "Windows Server 2008" can tell if a hardware component is about to explode and do a hot swap on its own.

During the demonstration, Longhorn ran on an NEC Express5800/1000 server running Intel Itanium 2 chips and they didn't explode either.

Punters using the NEC gear could tell a Longhorn server to 'borrow' processors and memory that may be sitting idle, or were used for another application, if a given application's performance threshold hits 90 percent.

But without any hot swapping explosions it seems that Microsoft has conspired to take the fun out our lives.

More here. µ