'Private Cloud' Takes Center Stage at Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2010

BERLIN, Nov. 8, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Less than two weeks after announcing major updates to Windows Azure at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft Corp. again demonstrated the breadth of its vision for cloud computing today when it unveiled Hyper-V Cloud, a set of programs and offerings that makes it easier for businesses to build their own private cloud infrastructures using the Windows Server platform. Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., HP, IBM Corp. and NEC Corp. have already signed on as Hyper-V Cloud partners, and will be working with Microsoft to deliver prevalidated infrastructure and services that enable organizations to implement private clouds with increased speed and reduced risk.

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“Many of our customers have told us they want the benefits of cloud-computing — fast deployment, increased agility, lower costs — but with tight control over things like physical infrastructure and security policies,” said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Management and Security Division. “Our new private cloud offerings fulfill that need at the infrastructure level, while providing a clear migration path to cloud services at the platform level.”

Building Private Clouds With Hyper-V Cloud and the Windows Server Platform

Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft’s server platform, already delivers comprehensive virtualization and management capabilities through Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. These technologies, along with Microsoft System Center, provide the components organizations need to implement private clouds. With the new Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, Microsoft and its partners will deliver a broad choice of predefined, validated configurations for private cloud deployments, comprising compute, storage, networking resources, virtualization and management software. These programs and offerings help reduce the risk and increase the speed of private cloud deployments.

As part of the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, HP and Microsoft have jointly developed HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V, a reference architecture that combines HP BladeSystem Matrix, Microsoft System Center and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to provide customers with a proven foundation for running business applications within a private cloud computing environment. This solution helps reduce infrastructure deployment time, enables dynamic flexing of physical and virtual resource pools, and delivers comprehensive management of Hyper-V virtualized infrastructure and applications. HP also offers HP CloudStart for Hyper-V to deliver to clients a fully operational, private cloud environment within 30 days.

“Organizations are challenged with IT sprawl and siloed infrastructure, which complicate the deployment, maintenance and management of IT services,” said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, Industry Standard Servers and Software, HP. “Private cloud environments based on HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V and delivered by HP Cloud consulting services address these challenges by enabling domain experts to configure IT resources once,  and IT service owners to provision and reconfigure resources as needed.”

In addition, Microsoft announced other components of Hyper-V Cloud:

• Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider Program. More than 70 service providers around the world offer infrastructure as a finished, fully hosted service built on Microsoft technology. This option delivers a fast, cost-effective implementation for cloud services, both private and public. Service providers include Korean Internet Data Center; Fasthosts (U.K., U.S.); Agarik (France); and Hostway Corp. (U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Romania).
• Hyper-V Cloud Deployment Guides. For customers who want to build their own private clouds on top of existing infrastructure investments, Microsoft is now offering tools and guidance based on expertise developed during hundreds of Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) customer engagements over the past few years. This element of the Hyper-V Cloud program optimizes for high levels of flexibility, control and customization.
• Hyper-V Cloud Accelerate. To tie it all together, Microsoft is making significant investments to help customers and partners fund assessments, proofs of concept and production deployments. These services will be delivered by MCS and pre-qualified members of the Microsoft Partner Network.

More information on Hyper-V Cloud and additional details on how Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC are participating in the program can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/privatecloud.

More Platform Enhancements

Microsoft made several other announcements at today’s event, including these:

• The general availability of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0, which makes it easier for customers to pool, allocate, consume and manage their computer, network and storage resources — critical components for a private cloud platform. More information on the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/private-cloud.aspx.
• The availability of the release candidate of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010, which is built on System Center Configuration Manager to unify management and security for desktops and servers.

More details on these and other announcements can be found in the full Tech-Ed Europe news fact sheet at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/cloud/docs/MSTEEFS.docx.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.