News

TechEd Europe: Enabling the Private Cloud

Microsoft rolls out a set of programs, products and service offerings called Hyper-V Cloud.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• December 01, 2010

While Microsoft has talked up its public cloud efforts in recent months, the company also is looking to show customers and partners that they can build private clouds based on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V.

Microsoft recently launched Hyper-V Cloud, a collection of programs, products and service offerings intended to facilitate private cloud deployment based on Windows Server and Hyper-V. The company debuted the effort at the annual Tech•Ed Europe conference in Berlin.

"This is a set of programs and initiatives that are expressly focused on helping you to get to a private cloud as fast as you can," said Brad Anderson, corporate VP of the Microsoft Management and Security division. Anderson unveiled Hyper-V Cloud in his keynote address at Tech•Ed.

Core to the offering is Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track, which lets customers purchase servers from participating vendors -- Dell Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and NEC Corp. The six vendors will deliver configurations for private cloud deployments validated by Microsoft based on reference architectures developed by the company. The vendors' cloud offerings have compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software configurations defined by Microsoft.

"We've pre-tested, we've pre-certified, we've preconfigured -- we know exactly how to optimize the performance of these so you can take these Fast Track Reference Architectures and rapidly use them to build out private clouds in your environments," Anderson said. Reference architectures from Dell, HP and IBM are currently available, he noted.

Microsoft also announced the Hyper-V Cloud Service Provider Program, which currently consists of 70 partners worldwide that will offer hosted private cloud services based on the Hyper-V cloud platform.

For customers who want to build their own private clouds using existing infrastructure, Microsoft launched Hyper-V Deployment Guides, a set of tools and guidance based on best practices provided through Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) engagements.

Microsoft also is offering a program called Hyper-V Cloud Accelerate, in which it will provide funding for proof-of-concepts and assessments. The services will be delivered by MCS and pre-certified partners in the Microsoft Partner Network.

Anderson also announced some deliverables from the Microsoft partnership with HP. The companies in January signed a three-year, $250 million pact to develop next-generation, converged datacenter technology. The two companies in November announced HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V, which consists of the HP Blade System Matrix with Microsoft System Center integrated into the platform.

According to Microsoft, the joint solution will reduce the time it takes to deploy a private cloud based on Hyper-V and will deliver "comprehensive" management of the virtualized infrastructure and applications.