Hi, it is a rough day for Vail, and I have been dreading today for a while as an avid Vail user myself. We know this is popular feature in regards to our home server product, and as such all expected that it would have created this type of outreach from our community. Today was about the high level reasons on why we made the DE decision in-regards to all three products - Vail, SBS 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Server Essentials.
This decision was not easy in regards to Vail. It was incredibly hard, and we always knew that a direction which affects the family of products such as this has different effects on the individual components. While support for hardware RAID solutions, application compatibility and data portability are definitely key scenarios for SBS 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials, for Windows Home Server users these areas may not seem as important. However, as our development for these products is very closely tied, a decision like this affects all three. We continue to look at ways to provide solutions for features such as data duplication, and are working with partners and OEM’s on extending both their hardware and software solutions for Vail.
Let me completely confirm we are 100% committed to Vail, and continue to work on all the core features outside of Drive Extender. We fully expect to be able to show some of our new and partnered OEM solutions at CES.
Thanks
Michael
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