At its TechEd 2011 conference in Atlanta, Microsoft highlighted how customers and partners can take advantage of Microsoft's public and private cloud solutions.
Atlanta-At the Microsoft TechEd North America 2011
conference here, Microsoft officials spoke on how to build, deploy,
manage and scale applications for the cloud and for devices.
In a keynote, Robert Wahbe, corporate vice
president of the Server and Tools Marketing Group at Microsoft, said as
the trend toward virtualization increases, the move to the cloud will
be easier.
After citing figures on the increased use of
virtualization in data centers, Wahbe said, "This move to virtualization
is setting us all for a much bigger inflection point, and that is the
cloud-the public cloud and the private cloud."
Then Wahbe showcased how customers HSBC and
Travelocity.com LP are using Microsoft's virtualization and public and
private cloud solutions to help reduce costs and speed innovation. In
addition, NetApp and Cisco Systems have joined the growing ranks of
partners in Microsoft's Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, designed to
streamline the delivery of a private cloud.
Meanwhile, to help ensure that HSBC, a worldwide
financial services firm, can accommodate shifts in demand for a range
of internal systems and also further simplify management of its
infrastructure, the company announced it will use Microsoft Hyper-V in
combination with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. HSBC
today announced its first project to deploy Microsoft Hyper-V to
support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which will help reduce the cost
of desktop management.
In addition, NetApp and Cisco joined the Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track
program, which enables Microsoft and its partners to deliver a broad
choice of predefined, validated configurations to accelerate
well-managed private cloud deployments. NetApp has teamed with Cisco to
develop a private cloud solution, the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track
with Cisco datacenter architecture.
"By creating a solution with Microsoft Hyper-V
Cloud Fast Track, NetApp with Cisco is simplifying private cloud
deployment and operations," said Phil Brotherton, vice president and
general manager of the Microsoft Business Unit at NetApp, in a
statement. "Customers will be able to reduce deployment time from days
to hours, and they will gain greater utilization."
Travelocity, a global online travel agency,
showcased how it chose Microsoft's public cloud solution, Windows
Azure, to deploy its Java-based critical analytics system to the cloud
in just two months.
"At Travelocity, we work hard to understand our
customers and make travel a quick and easy experience for them," said
Dave Matthews, chief technology officer at Travelocity, in a statement.
"We wanted the same for our transition to cloud computing, and the
ability to quickly get new products to market, regardless of the
platform, is an important benefit of Windows Azure, allowing us to
easily move and deploy a core application to our business."
"Businesses are enthusiastic about the economic
advantages that the cloud can provide, and they want to know their
existing IT investments will take them into the future," Wahbe said in
a statement. "Microsoft's unique approach to cloud computing takes this
into account, providing customers with the technology and an enhanced
business model to run their business across the public or private
cloud, or a combination of both."
In a May 16 blog post, Wahbe said:
"I talked about three benefits of cloud computing:
agility, focus, and economics. You benefit from agility when you become
free to more quickly deploy an application or respond to changing
conditions without having to worry about hardware. (See how T-Mobile
took advantage of cloud services to speed time to market for a social
networking solution.) You benefit from focus when you are freed to
worry less about the infrastructure and more about your critical
business problems. (See how the Tribune
used the cloud to easily provide consumers with targeted content
through online, mobile, and traditional distribution methods.) How
you benefit from the economics of cloud computing is worth exploring in
some detail. In a whitepaper Microsoft published last fall, 'The Economics of the Cloud,'
the authors argue that the best way to develop a vision for where cloud
computing is taking the industry is by analyzing the economics driving
the trend."
Moreover, as businesses look to further enable IT
efficiency through the deployment of virtualization and cloud
solutions, Microsoft also announced the following:
There are now additional supported hypervisor scenarios for virtualized
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, including Unified Messaging. This
combines Exchange's high-availability solutions, Database Availability
Groups, with hypervisor-based clustering and failover solutions.
Organizations planning to virtualize their Exchange 2010 deployments
can get details from The Exchange Team Blog.
New license mobility options will become available July 1, 2011,
through Microsoft Volume Licensing agreements with an active Software
Assurance benefit. The new options will provide customers with the
flexibility to deploy application services on-premises or through
hosted service providers in the cloud. More information is available on
the Microsoft Partner Network Volume Licensing Website.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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