Now you too can have a standardized, turnkey Azure cloud of your very own.
Microsoft announced Monday that it’s boxing the thing up as a server appliance so that companies and government agencies touchy about where their data is can have private Azure clouds, and service providers can set up public Azure clouds. It will also be the basis of hybrid Azure clouds.
HP, Dell and Fujitsu have thrown in with this idea and will be peddling the things as well as running their own Azure clouds. eBay is one of the first enterprise takers and means to have an internal Azure cloud up and running new applications in two of its data centers this year, expanding to other uses later.
The vendors mean to sell versions of Azure with their own particular hardware although they’re together kind of vague about what they will look like, how many servers each Azure instance will run, or what they will cost. It doesn’t even have a pricing model yet. Resellers are also nervous about how they’ll fit in.
The three OEMs already have in hand what Microsoft calls a limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance and they all mean to sell a plethora of services around it.
The appliance, expected to be in broader release later this year, will support anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of servers. Initial version will start around a thousand.
Fujitsu apparently means to put its back into the venture because its president Masami Yamamoto told a press conference in Japan that Fujitsu would spend $1.13 billion (100 billion yen) on cloud computing in the 12 months starting this past April 1 – that’s up 54% – and sees itself selling 1.3-1.5 trillion yen of the things, up from 100 billion yen in Fujitsu’s last fiscal year. Fujitsu’s also looking for more global partnerships and acquisitions.
Fujitsu will set up the appliance in its data centers in Japan to start and in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore and Germany by next March. It says it will offer IaaS and AaaS services as well as a newfangled activity-as-a-service. It will train 5,000 consultants and developers to work with customers and ISVs.
Microsoft says it currently has 10,000 paying customers on the public Azure cloud running on Microsoft’s own infrastructure. eBay is one of them; it uses the thing to power the iPad version of its web site.
The newfangled appliance consists of Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware optimized for scale-out applications. Some apps may have to be modified.
Microsoft quotes IDC as projecting that the cloud will drive 19% of new software spending in 2013-14 and that cloud spending will grow five times faster than applications spending or 26% CAGR.
Microsoft also said Monday that it has a release candidate for System Center Virtual Machine Self Service Portal 2.0 and a beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. It introduced the Microsoft Management and Virtualization Solution Incentive and Private Cloud Deployment Kit.
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