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Serving Up the Cloud

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Microsoft is closing in on the private cloud market with its server operating system made fully cloud-ready. Called as Windows Server 2012, it is touted to be the most important server product announcement from Microsoft in history.

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"Microsoft built Windows Server 2012 from the cloud up, applying its experience operating global data centers that rely on hundreds of thousands of servers to deliver more than 200 cloud services," says Satya Nadella, president, server and tools business, Microsoft.

Nadella calls Windows Server 2012 as the cornerstone of the Cloud OS, an all-encompassing term used for a consistent and unified platform across all cloud formats-private, hosted, and public clouds. Windows Azure and System Center are the two other products that form Microsoft's cloud play from a platform point of view.

Adds Nadella, "To be clear, consistency is not a statement about packaging or offers, but rather about the underlying technology designs. We've built the Cloud OS components in concert-not acquired them as piece parts-which provides a further level of consistency and cohesion across deployment scenarios."

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The New Server OS

Today's environment is characterized by rapid growth in devices, mobility, personalized applications, and social media interactions that leads to massive accumulation of data which hold the potential for smart analytics. This is forcing a change in how computing, storage, and networking come together in scalable, automated, shared, and adaptive platforms that deliver modern applications to power the world's computing experiences. A computing platform that unifies these priorities but one that is easy to acquire, run, and manage is the need of the hour.

Windows Server 2012 tackles these requirements thus:

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  • Harnessing the Power of Virtualization: Virtualizations with Windows Server 2012 helps improve both scalability and performance. It helps you deliver a fully-isolated, multi-tenant environment that includes tools to help guarantee SLAs, enable chargebacks, and support self-service scenarios. It also allows virtualization of networks and enables software-defined networking. It also provides network isolation among the VMs running on different virtual networks, enabling multi-tenant environments.
  • Improved Storage Management: Through maximizing capacity by thin-provisioning and trimming of VM storage, pooling diverse storage resources, and abstracting them for flexible usage throughout your environment.
  • Elastic Applications and Secure Infrastructure: Broad, scalable, server platform that gives flexibility to build, deploy, and manage applications and websites on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, using a consistent set of tools and frameworks.
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Delivering on the Promise of Cloud

Some enterprises have started deploying Windows Server 2012. Microsoft's survey of 70 early adopter customers from across the globe revealed that they expect, on average, 52% reduction in downtime, 41% reduction in workload deployment time, and 15 hours of productivity time saved per year, per employee. 91% of the companies surveyed expect a reduction in server administration labor, and 88% expect reduction in network administration labor.

As an example, in India, ISGN, a mortgage solutions company, was considering moving out of a traditional data center to a hosted or cloud based data center. They were already evaluating options of virtualization from VMWare and Citrix. They chose Windows Server 2012 driven by the option for co-location, ability to scale, and the flexibility to consolidate several cluttered things. Says Kumaran Mudaliar, VP, information technology, ISGN, "Since our core business is mortgage and analytics, our goal is to offer customers secure and reliable platform. We think Windows Server 2012 will help us do that."

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ISGN is using Windows Server 2012 in many environments along with pilots in some of them. They say that with self-service options, it reduces the burden of handling day-to-day service issues. In addition, the cost of operations stands minimal, given long-term benefits associated with it.

Windows Azure is an open public cloud platform, suited for small footprint business services or apps for large organizations or as infrastructure for SMBs. Companies such as Essar Group, Sporting Mindz, Idhasoft, and Gradatim are using the platform as low-cost option for hosting business services. Further, Windows Azure makes a good platform for budding entrepreneurs in India. Reportedly, Windows Azure has been deployed by more than 3,000 Indian companies.

Icertis is into providing enterprise solutions in the Microsoft cloud. Says Monish Darda, co-founder and CTO, ICERTIS, "We built core solutions on Microsoft Azure platform, since it helps their customers deploying cloud-based solutions faster and easier way."

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