Part of: Microsoft Cloud OS vision, delivery and ecosystem rollout
1. The Microsoft way
2. Microsoft Cloud OS vision
3. Microsoft Cloud OS delivery and ecosystem rollout
4. Microsoft products for the Cloud OS (separate post)
4. 1 Windows Server 2012 R2 & System Center 2012 R2
4.2 Unlock Insights from any Data – SQL Server 2014
4.3 Unlock Insights from any Data / Big Data – Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and Windows Azure HDInsights
4.4 Empower people-centric IT – Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
4.5 Microsoft talking about Cloud OS and private clouds: starting with Ray Ozzie in November, 2009
4.5.1 Tiny excerpts from official executive and/or corporate communications
4.5.2 More official communications in details from executives and/or corporate
4.5 Microsoft talking about Cloud OS and private clouds: starting with Ray Ozzie in November, 2009
4.5.1 Tiny excerpts from official executive and/or corporate communications
From: Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia: PDC 2009 [speech transcripts, Nov 17, 2009]
RAY OZZIE:
Windows Azure, which we introduced right here on this stage last year, is our cloud computing operating environment, designed from the outset to holistically manage extremely large pools of computation, storage and networking, all as a single, dynamic, seamless whole, as a service. It’s a cloud OS designed for the future, but made familiar for today.
Microsoft’s New Leader of Server and Tools: ‘Our Mission Is to Cloud-Optimize Every Business’ [feature article for the press, June 22, 2011]
Satya Nadella shares his thoughts on trends in the technology industry and Microsoft’s unique position providing infrastructure to move the industry forward.
… “As the industry moves more and more towards the public cloud – which will take time – we’ll move from the private cloud ‘datacenter OS’ that represents thousands of processing cores to a ‘public cloud OS’ that will need to understand a million cores. Our customers will want a vendor who is both battle-tested in the operating system and in the cloud scale services. Microsoft will be that vendor.”
“You can’t head-fake your way into running a public cloud service,” he notes. “You have to live it.” …
alias “MS private cloud PR”: Microsoft Brings the Cloud Down to Earth for Enterprises [press release, Jan 17, 2012]
System Center 2012 is a true “private cloud builder.”
All Together Now: Private Cloud Simplicity and Best Economics
The Microsoft Private Cloud: Built for the Future. Ready Now
From: Meet the Team That Puts ‘Amazing Power’ at People’s Fingertips [Microsoft feature article for the press, Feb 14, 2012]
Members of the Windows Server team speak with Microsoft News Center [MNC] about their groundbreaking work in moving customers to the cloud—and what else they find fascinating.
MNC: How is your work going to change the world?
MNC: What’s next for you at Microsoft?
Windows Server “8” beta available now! [Windows Server Blog, March 1, 2012]
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud
Microsoft Ushers in the ‘Era of the Cloud OS’ [press release, June 11, 2012]
Company shares updates to cloud platform and developer tools.
Connecting With the Cloud
Enabling Developers With Cloud Tools
Welcome to the Era of the Cloud OS for Infrastructure! [The Official Microsoft Blog, June 11, 2012]
Posted by Satya Nadella
President, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft
From: Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander: TechEd 2012 Day 1 Keynote [speech transcripts, June 11, 2012]
SATYA NADELLA:
What we are going to discuss over the next 90 minutes, the modern datacenter, the modern application framework that make up the cloud operating system, the basic underpinnings for this new era of connected devices and continuous services.
Microsoft Announces New Cloud Opportunities for Partners [press release, July 10, 2012]
New guidance, training and programs for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure unveiled at Worldwide Partner Conference.
In addition, the new program announced on stage, Switch to Hyper-V, will allow partners to grow their virtualization, private and hybrid cloud computing practices while also helping customers improve IT agility at a lower cost with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.
In addition, in a keynote that further reinforced how Microsoft is working with its partners to transform businesses throughout the world, Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov highlighted the incredible opportunity in the year ahead for partners focused on selling business solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics.
A New Era Together: Partners and the Microsoft Cloud OS [The Official Microsoft Blog, July 10, 2012]
Posted by Takeshi Numoto
Corporate Vice President, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft
Partner Opportunity with the Cloud OS
From: Satya Nadella: Worldwide Partner Conference 2012 Day 2 Keynote [speech transcript, July 10, 2012]
The thing that I want to talk today about is the back end and how the back end is changing in the next era. And we refer to this as the cloud operating system or the cloud OS.
Windows Server 2012 Powers the Cloud OS [press release, Sept 4, 2012]
New server is built from the cloud up for the modern datacenter.
Enabling the Modern Datacenter
Customers Find Success With Windows Server 2012
Satya Nadella: Windows Server 2012 Launch Keynote [speech transcript, Sept 4, 2012]
For more than 50 years information technology has powered global innovation. And today, IT is in the midst of radical change as cloud computing transforms the landscape.
How can your organization take advantage of the new opportunities? Imagine data centers without boundaries, capacity on-demand. Imagine information crossing the globe seamlessly and securely, a modern platform for the world’s applications.
At Microsoft we unlock the full range of possibilities. We call it the Cloud OS and it’s here now.
Microsoft Reaches Agreement to Acquire StorSimple [press release, Oct 16, 2012]
Microsoft to acquire leader in Cloud-integrated Storage.
From: Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander: Build Day 2 [speech transcripts, Oct 31, 2012]
On the client side, we’ve talked about how we’ve reimagined Windows from the developer platform to the user experience. Again, in support of the kind of applications that you’re building for the devices today. These fluid, touch-first applications that also take advantage of capabilities in Windows RT to be able to truly bring to life all the new application capabilities.
Very similarly on the back end, we’re reimagining Windows for cloud services. It’s a pretty concrete thing for us. We refer to this as the Cloud OS. At the hardware level, for example, the core of any operating system is to think about the hardware abstraction. And the hardware abstraction is going through a pretty radical change. At the atomic level, we’re bringing compute, storage and network together, and then scaling it to a datacenter on a multidatacenter scale. So this is no longer about a single server operating system, but it’s about building distributed, virtualized infrastructure that includes storage, compute, and network and spans, if you will, across the datacenters.
alias “OS Moment PR”: Microsoft Advances the Cloud OS With New Management Solutions [press release, Jan 15, 2013]
New offerings deliver on the commitment to help customers and partners deliver cloud services and manage connected devices.
Transforming the Datacenter
Hosting Service Providers and the Cloud OS
Unified PC and Device Management
What is the Cloud OS? [The Official Microsoft Blog, Jan 15, 2013]
post from Michael Park, Corporate Vice President of Marketing in the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft
The Cloud OS: New solutions available today advance Microsoft’s vision [C&E News Bytes Blog, Jan 15, 2013]
Solutions announced today include:
General Availability of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: …
Windows Intune: …
Windows Azure services for Windows Server: …
Global Service Monitor: …
System Center Advisor: …
Transform Your Datacenter with System Center 2012 SP1 [Server & Cloud Blog, Jan 15, 2013]
Mike Schutz
General Manager, Windows Server and Management Product Marketing
Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 Support
Software Defined Networking (SDN)
DevOps with Global Service Monitor and Visual Studio
Hybrid Cloud Management
Delivering Unified Device Management with Windows Intune and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 [Windows Intune blog, Jan 15, 2013]
Mike Schutz
General Manager, Windows Server and Management Product Marketing
This blog post highlights new device management capabilities in Windows Intune and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP1.
Windows Intune addresses new challenges IT departments face when managing devices, including: …
Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 enhancements, including: …
Endpoint Protection 2012 SP1 enhancements, including: …
Modern Lifecycle on the Cloud OS [Brian Harry’s blog, Jan 15, 2013]
Brian Harry
Microsoft Technical Fellow,
Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server.
Our approach to Enterprise DevOps is anchored in Visual Studio 2012 and System Center 2012. The wave of Cloud OS announcements today integrates these with bunch of new application lifecycle management capabilities. These include:
Global Service Monitor (GSM)
Lab Management & Windows 2012
Incident integration
Michael Park and Mike Schutz: Cloud OS Announcement [speech transcripts, Jan. 15, 2013]
Corporate vice president of Server & Tools Marketing Michael Park is going to lead off with a brief overview of the Cloud OS, and then our general manager Mike Schutz here in Server & Tools will talk through the new offerings and how they fit into the Cloud OS story for customers and partners.
alias “Hybrid Cloud PR”: Microsoft unleashes fall wave of enterprise cloud solutions [press release, Oct 7, 2013]
New Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, SQL Server, and Dynamics solutions will accelerate cloud benefits for customers.
Hybrid infrastructure and modern applications
Enabling enterprise cloud adoption
Data platform and insights
People and devices in the cloud
Software as a service business solutions
New Windows Server 2012 R2 Innovations – Download Now [Windows Server Blog, Aug 6, 2013]
Windows Server 2012 R2 is in preview right now and ready for your evaluation. We have been rolling out detailed information on our Cloud OS vision through Brad Anderson’s What’s New in 2012 R2 blog series. That will continue but we thought you would like a short consolidated list for consideration. Here are some key innovations in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Storage transformation – Delivers breakthrough performance at a fraction of the cost
Software defined networking – Provides new levels of agility and flexibility
Virtualization and live migration – Provides an integrated and high-performance virtualization platform
Access & Information Protection – Empowering your users to be productive while maintaining control and security of corporate information with Windows Server 2012 R2
Java application monitoring – Enables deep application insight into Java applications.
This is by no means a comprehensive lists of new features and benefits, but we just wanted to give you some information on the key focus areas.
Announcing the General Availability of Windows Server 2012 R2: The Heart of Cloud OS [Windows Server Blog, Oct 18, 2013]
For years now, Microsoft has been building and operating some of the largest cloud applications in the world. The expertise culled from these experiences along with our established history of delivering market-leading enterprise operating systems, platforms, and applications has led us to develop a new approach for the modern era: the Microsoft Cloud OS.
Delivered as an enterprise-class, the simple and cost-effective server and cloud platform Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers significant value around seven key capabilities:
Server virtualization.
Storage.
Networking.
Server management and automation.
Web and application platform.
Access and information protection.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
To compete in the global economy and keep up with the pace of innovation, IT organizations must improve their agility, their efficiency, and their ability to better manage costs while enabling their business and end users to stay continuously productive.
alias “Cloud OS Network PR”: Leading cloud service providers around the globe bet on Microsoft [press release, Dec 12, 2013]
Cloud OS Network partners provide customers with consistent cloud platform.
Hybrid benefits for customers
Cloud service provider opportunity
Worldwide reach
4.5.2 More official communications in details from executives and/or corporate
From: Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia: PDC 2009 [speech transcripts, Nov 17, 2009]
RAY OZZIE:
Earlier, when I talked about the three screens and a cloud environment, I talked fairly abstractly about this cloud computing back-end. Sometimes I might have referred to this back-end as a server or sometimes as a service. And for customers it really doesn’t matter, and that’s entirely the point, because our software plus services strategy is centered on the notion of technology convergence and skills leverage across both.
Windows Azure, which we introduced right here on this stage last year, is our cloud computing operating environment, designed from the outset to holistically manage extremely large pools of computation, storage and networking, all as a single, dynamic, seamless whole, as a service. It’s a cloud OS designed for the future, but made familiar for today.
Windows Azure at its core is Windows. It’s Windows Server. You should think of it as a vast, homogeneous array of Windows Server hardware and virtualized Windows Server instances, and all these servers are under the control of a sophisticated, highly parallel management system called the Azure Fabric Controller, which you can kind of think of as an extension of System Center’s management capabilities in the enterprise.
With Windows Azure, Windows Server, and System Center, there’s one coherent model of managing this infrastructure as a service across Microsoft’s public cloud to private cloud to clouds of our partners who host.
To most developers, to developers like you, Windows Azure appears as a model based extension to Visual Studio, enabling you to build apps that leverage your skills in SQL, IIS, ASP.NET, and .NET Framework.
Alternatively, and of course it’s your choice, you might leverage your skills by using MySQL and PHP within Azure, or you might instead take advantage of our new Azure tools for Java and Eclipse.
Reaching all developers is incredibly important to us, and working closely with the community developing for Windows Azure this year has come a long, long way.
It was only one year ago at PDC ’08 that we launched Azure by inviting you as PDC participants to our Community Technology Preview. We committed to spending the year engaged with you, listening and learning, and reshaping Azure before we took it live.
Microsoft’s New Leader of Server and Tools: ‘Our Mission Is to Cloud-Optimize Every Business’ [feature article for the press, June 22, 2011]
Satya Nadella, the new president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB), recently told Microsoft employees that “Microsoft has always stood for democratizing access to computing platforms. We did it with PC-based server computing, the biggest democratizing force ever. We have a similar opportunity now with cloud computing that will make it possible for companies of all sizes, and countries of all GDPs, to really take advantage of latest technology to improve productivity and people’s lives.”
Nadella added that his top priority as STB president is to cultivate a vibrant engineering community armed with best tools around. That community in turn will lead the company through a computing shift every bit as transformational as the rise of the PC.
As the industry moves toward what he calls the “post-virtualization era,” Nadella reflects on the industry trends that are driving the shift. First, the notion of a modern operating system is shifting from software running on a single, physical server, to software running across an entire datacenter of servers. Services traditionally managed by a machine – storage, networking, compute – are no longer bound to a particular machine. This notion of an “elastic” infrastructure can have significant business benefits for customers. Moreover, he says, the data itself is becoming a platform developers can build on that leads to a whole new set of innovative application scenarios.
Delivering companies new value through the cloud will be at the center of everything STB does moving forward: “Our strategy in a nutshell is to cloud-optimize every business,” he said. That means offering businesses on-demand, scalable infrastructure and the ability to tap massive amounts of data for new business insight.
Nadella, a Microsoft veteran since 1992, was appointed to his new role in February. As president of STB, he is tasked with leading Microsoft’s enterprise transformation into the cloud and providing the technology roadmap and vision for the future of business computing.
Nadella said his vision for STB has been shaped by the previous stops on his Microsoft journey. Up until a few months ago, he was senior vice president of R&D for Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD). There he oversaw the technical vision and engineering of some of the biggest Web services in the world, such as Bing, MSN, and adCenter. Those online operations illuminated the sheer scale of infrastructure needed to run them; Bing alone is powered by 250,000 servers, which manage upwards of 150 petabytes (1 petabyte=1 quadrillion bytes.)
You can’t head-fake your way into running a public cloud service. You have to live it.
- Satya Nadella, President, Server & Tools Business,
The last time Nadella had thought about computing at that scale was in the abstract at graduate school. His boss at the time, OSD President Qi Lu, told him to embrace the new perspective.
“Qi would stress to me, ‘Look, as long as you don’t get Internet scale in its full-glory detail, you just don’t get the systems you need to build going forward,’” he said.
During four and half years at OSD, Nadella absorbed the lesson. He said his time at OSD prompted him to relearn infrastructure – something he wants to help Microsoft’s server business to do as it presses on into cloud computing. Massive systems infrastructure is required to handle workloads like Bing or Microsoft adCenter, which runs 20,000 simultaneous auctions each time a search query happens. That scale has shaped his thinking about the back-end infrastructure Microsoft must build going forward.
“As the industry moves more and more towards the public cloud – which will take time – we’ll move from the private cloud ‘datacenter OS’ that represents thousands of processing cores to a ‘public cloud OS’ that will need to understand a million cores. Our customers will want a vendor who is both battle-tested in the operating system and in the cloud scale services. Microsoft will be that vendor.”
“You can’t head-fake your way into running a public cloud service,” he notes. “You have to live it.”
Nadella doesn’t have to think twice when asked about his plans for STB’s future. “We have the leading server operating system share and the most widely used database, professional developer tools, and mission critical developer framework in the industry. But we can’t be complacent – we will continue to grow our existing business, but the cloud will shape the future of the industry, and we aim to be the industry leader.”
alias “MS private cloud PR”: Microsoft Brings the Cloud Down to Earth for Enterprises [press release, Jan 17, 2012]
System Center 2012 is a true “private cloud builder.”
In an online broadcast today from Microsoft Corp. headquarters, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Server and Tools Business, laid out how Microsoft’s private cloud solution will help businesses move faster, save money and better compete in 2012. He highlighted how companies, such as webcast participants Lufthansa Systems, T. Rowe Price and Unilever, can use Microsoft System Center 2012 to build and operate private clouds for the delivery of business applications across both private and public cloud platforms. System Center 2012 is available today in a Release Candidate as a single, integrated private cloud management solution for the first time.
“IT leaders tell me that private cloud computing promises to help them focus on innovation over maintenance, to streamline costs and to respond to the need for IT speed,” Nadella said. “We are delivering on that promise today. With System Center 2012, customers can move beyond the industry hype and speculation, and progress into the here and now of private cloud.”
All Together Now: Private Cloud Simplicity and Best Economics
New advances in System Center 2012 demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to easing the acquisition, deployment and economics of private cloud computing.
“A private cloud is our answer to corralling our server infrastructure into a single entity we can use to more rapidly deliver services that really matter to our business,” said Peter Daniels, vice president of IT at T. Rowe Price. “System Center 2012 is truly a game changer.”
System Center 2012 integrates eight separate component products into one unified solution, streamlining installation and reducing the time it takes to deploy from days down to hours. The number of product versions has also been simplified, so customers will be able to choose between the Standard and Datacenter editions of the product, based on their virtualization requirements. And because System Center 2012 Datacenter edition licensing covers unlimited virtual machines, customers can continually grow their private clouds without additional licensing costs for virtualizing their infrastructure and applications.
The Microsoft Private Cloud: Built for the Future. Ready Now
Lufthansa Systems and Unilever are also relying on System Center 2012 and the Microsoft private cloud.
“We are making the move to cloud computing across our company, and after looking at our options, Microsoft offers the right solutions for us,” said Holger Berndt, head of Microsoft Servers at Lufthansa Systems. “With the integrated approach and technology, we can use the people and skills we have in place now to build the private cloud services we need to meet the complex IT requirements of our customers. Microsoft brings it all together, including the clear path to public cloud on Windows Azure.”
“Our private cloud will help us meet our goal of doubling Unilever’s business without increasing our environmental footprint,” said Mike Royle, enterprise services IT director at Unilever. “Working with Avanade, we are betting on System Center 2012 as the management platform to extend our investments in virtualization toward private cloud, to automate processes, and to ensure the reliability of our infrastructure and application services.”
More information is available at the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform website, including the on-demand broadcast, links to the Microsoft private cloud evaluation software and more. The conversation on Twitter can be followed at #MSFTprivatecloud.
From: Meet the Team That Puts ‘Amazing Power’ at People’s Fingertips [Microsoft feature article for the press, Feb 14, 2012]
Members of the Windows Server team speak with Microsoft News Center about their groundbreaking work in moving customers to the cloud—and what else they find fascinating.
Betsy Speare, a principle program manager lead in the Windows Server Manageability team
Erin Chapple, a partner group program manager in the Server and Cloud Division
Jeffrey Snover, a Distinguished Engineer who is also the lead architect for Windows Server
What Chapple, Speare, Jeffrey Snover …, and the rest of their team are working on right now is the next version of Windows Server, code-named “Windows Server 8” [Windows Server 2012], which will provide better management capabilities, increased security and significant cost savings. Windows Server 8 will also help many Microsoft customers move more of their business to the cloud.
“Windows Server 8 really sets us up to enable the little guy to get ahead,” says Speare, whose responsibilities include overseeing Group Policy, the most widely used management tool in the world. “That’s what the cloud does; it puts this amazing power at everyone’s fingertips. With this release, we’re building the platform for that. When people who aren’t deeply technical have the capability to create solutions because the power is right there, it will be amazing to see what happens.”
Microsoft News Center (MNC) recently sat down with Chapple, Speare and Snover, to talk about Windows Server and life in general.
MNC: How is your work going to change the world?
Snover: Servers really are changing the world. Literally. Look at all these mobile phones. The reason why they exist is because of servers at the back end. In the past, when you had to run entire applications on your client device, the client had to be a big monster machine or you couldn’t do stuff. Now that most of the processing is done in a data center, you can get a great experience on a very small device.
Windows Server 8 is the biggest, most transformational server release we’ve ever had. It’s not just the great advances we’ve made in storage, networking and virtualization. What’s most transformational is the change of identity. In past, we always viewed Windows Server as an operating system for a single server. With Windows Server 8, we now see it as a cloud operating system, which is to say an OS for lots of servers and all the devices that connect them. That means we’re able to give customers a far more coherent experience at lower cost and lower effort on their part.
Chapple: One of the key things we work on is a technology called PowerShell. As you think about what’s happening in the world today, with the proliferation of servers, devices and services, our customers need a way to manage all those components that is efficient, one-to-many, repeatable and consistent. PowerShell is our answer to that.
Customers tell us they feel overwhelmed by the number of things they have to do to manage their environment. PowerShell can help them gain control over their environment and get them out of that world of chaos.
Snover: By enabling the move to the cloud, servers are even transforming the way we do science. In the past, science was driven by hypotheses. Someone would think about the world, generate a hypothesis, and then run a set of experiments to validate or invalidate it. But with the large data centers we have today, we can take an entirely new approach. We’re now able to configure these servers to throw massive computing power at a problem, and to reverse engineer a hypothesis based on what the data is telling us. This allows us to solve bigger problems than we’ve ever been able to solve before.
…
MNC: What’s next for you at Microsoft?
Snover: What’s next for me is figuring out how we take this vision of a cloud OS and break it down into discrete steps. That’s really a 10-year-plus vision. It’s a dramatic increase in the scope of what we want to do. So how do we break that down and ensure that Windows has a smooth transition between where we are and where we need to be?
Bill Gates once said, “Vision is cheap.” At the time, I thought he was a bit of a jerk for saying that. But I then realized that he was right. Vision is cheap. The hard part is figuring out how to get from here to there. There have been many projects with grand visions that have run themselves onto the rocks because no one could break them down into a step-by-step approach. That’s what my job is.
Chapple: I was fortunate enough to take my sabbatical last fall and travel the world for three months, which gave me a chance to clear my head, recharge, and figure out what I want to do. It gave me this great perspective.
I feel like I’m at the end of one journey and the beginning of another. I’ve been working in manageability for the last five years or so, and when I started in manageability it was a four-letter word. People were like, “I don’t want to think about how I make my product manageable; I want to just build great features.” With the move to the cloud and the move to services, the manageability of our system has become more of a focal point and an asset. With Windows Server 8, we really have pulled all the pieces together and we’re delivering a great solution.
I am just so proud of the work we’re doing. We’re at this inflection point from a cloud perspective. There’s a great opportunity to think about what we want to do with Windows Server, and how we hope to help people migrate to the cloud. So I’m all in, in terms of figuring out what the next turn of the crank means for Windows Server. I think we have more opportunities than we ever had in the past, and it’s exciting to be part of that.
Windows Server “8” beta available now! [Windows Server Blog, March 1, 2012]
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud
The beta of Windows Server “8” is now available for IT professionals and software developers around the world to download, to evaluate, and to give us feedback on.
In September we introduced Windows Server “8” with a preview to help developers and hardware partners prepare new and existing applications, systems and devices. The response from that community, along with hundreds of customers in our early adopters program, has been incredibly positive. A common theme of feedback has been how broad and deep the new capabilities are.
Now is the time for you, IT professionals in organizations of all sizes, to get your hands on this new release, discover the new capabilities and contribute to the development of what we call the cloud-optimized OS.
I’ll highlight in this post just a few examples of new capabilities that you’ll want to explore.
With the new Hyper-V we are taking virtualization above and beyond to provide a multi-tenant platform for cloud computing. For example, with Hyper-V Network Virtualization you can create virtual networks so different business units, or even multiple customers, can seamlessly share network infrastructure. You will be able to move virtual machines and servers around without losing their network assignments.
In Windows Server “8” we are delivering high availability and disaster recovery through software technology on much more cost effective hardware. For example, with File Server Transparent Failover you can now more easily perform hardware or software maintenance of nodes in a File Server cluster by moving file shares between nodes with little interruption to server applications that are storing data on those file shares.
We’re also delivering a tremendous amount of new capabilities for multi-machine management and automation. You will want to explore the dramatic new improvements to Server Manager, as well as the new Windows PowerShell. With 2,300 commandlets provided out of the box, Windows PowerShell allows you to automate everything you can do manually with the user interface. And, with technologies like Intellisense, we’ve made it very easy for you to master all of that power.
Additionally, Windows Server “8” provides a powerful server application platform that enables you to develop and host the most demanding of application workloads. For example, with .NET Framework 4.5 you can take advantage of new asynch language and library support to build server and web applications that scale far beyond what other platforms provide. Our new IIS 8 web server provides better security isolation and resource sand-boxing between applications, native support for web sockets, and the ability to host significantly more sites on a server.
This is just a brief taste of the hundreds of features and capabilities you will find in the beta. (My team has written a number of other posts you can read here.) If you have been using and providing feedback on the developer preview of Windows Server “8,” thank you! I can’t wait for more people to start trying out Windows Server “8” and letting us know what they think.
Microsoft Ushers in the ‘Era of the Cloud OS’ [press release, June 11, 2012]
Today at the 20th annual TechEd North America conference, Microsoft Server and Tools Business President Satya Nadella welcomed a sold-out crowd of more than 10,000 to the era of the cloud operating system (OS) for infrastructure. Nadella described how the cloud OS drives both the modern datacenter and enables the development and management of modern applications, demonstrating how customers can benefit from this transformation with agility, focus and lower costs. He also announced updates to the company’s developer tools and availability of the next release of Windows Intune, the company’s cloud-based solution for PC and mobile device management and security.
Built on decades of experience gleaned from running massive datacenters at scale, Windows Server 2012 is the cloud-optimized server OS for customers of all sizes, and Windows Azure, updated with new services and features, delivers both infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service capabilities. Built to complement each other with consistent development, management and identity, they make it easier to create, migrate, deploy and manage applications across public, private and hybrid clouds.
“The operating system does two things: it looks after the hardware, and it provides a platform for applications. The modern datacenter and modern apps put more pressure than ever on infrastructure to become truly cloud-optimized, and that’s where Microsoft builds on our legacy with the OS to help our customers,” Nadella said. “Microsoft is your partner in the transformation of IT because only Microsoft offers the modern, yet familiar, platform that enables you to connect with the cloud on your terms.”
Connecting With the Cloud
Every customer’s path to the cloud will be unique, which is why Microsoft Corp. is optimizing its technologies and tools so customers can easily connect to public, private or hybrid clouds when they are ready. Customers, such as Aflac Inc., ING Direct and Tribune Co., are already working with Microsoft to expand their datacenters into the cloud to scale on demand and help reduce infrastructure costs.
“Delivering content to thousands of users across multiple devices and platforms requires a level of infrastructure that’s easier to manage and more affordable with the cloud,” said Denise Schuster, senior vice president of Digital Innovations for Tribune Company. “We are currently using various methods to deliver content via cloud services, and we’re moving our digital content to Windows Azure to help us find new ways to better deliver a targeted, more personalized experience for our customer base.”
To ease customers’ transitions to the cloud, Microsoft underscored the release candidate of Windows Server 2012, recent updates to Windows Azure and the release of Windows Intune. Together, these new releases make it even easier for customers to leverage one modern operating system across public, private and hybrid clouds and manage a multitude of devices connected to those clouds.
Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC). Released May 31, 2012, the Windows Server 2012 RC is available for customers to download and evaluate today. Advancements in storage, networking and scalability have been drawn from Microsoft’s experience running public cloud services.
Windows Azure. Windows Azure is newly updated with preview support for Virtual Machine and Virtual Network, support for Windows and Linux images, and additional support for Java and Python.
Windows Intune. The next release of Windows Intune, now available athttp://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windowsintune/pc-management.aspx, includes expanded management and security benefits through mobile device management and adds people-centric management capabilities and upgrade rights to the latest version of Windows.
Enabling Developers With Cloud Tools
To streamline and accelerate application development and deployment, Microsoft Team Foundation Service, an application lifecycle management tool hosted on Windows Azure, is now even easier for teams to integrate into their development process. Team Foundation Service features collaboration tools, a code repository, and powerful reporting and traceability tools to help teams more effectively manage software development. Beginning today, a public preview of Team Foundation Service is available at http://tfspreview.com.
To help developers and IT professionals build immersive experiences that scale across devices and the cloud, the company announced that Microsoft LightSwitch, an easy-to-use development tool for quickly building applications, will now render HTML5. Integrating HTML5 into LightSwitch will enable developers using the tool to target any device or platform supporting HTML5.
Those who want to learn more about today’s news or watch the keynotes should visit the TechEd North America 2012 virtual press kit. Those who want additional context on the news should visit Satya Nadella’s post on the Official Microsoft Blog.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Welcome to the Era of the Cloud OS for Infrastructure! [The Official Microsoft Blog, June 11, 2012]
Posted by Satya Nadella
President, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft
Twenty years ago at Microsoft’s first annual TechEd conference, we gathered to talk about the industry transformation from mainframe to minis to client/server computing. The vehicle for that transformation was the Windows operating system. Today at TechEd, we’re again talking about the industry transformation: the transformation to the cloud. Once again, the Windows operating system is the vehicle for this transformation.
Let me step back. At the most basic level, any operating system has two “jobs”: it needs to manage the underlying hardware, and it needs to provide a platform for applications. The fundamental role of an operating system has not changed, but the scale at which servers are deployed and the type of applications now available or in development are changing massively. On the hardware front, the “unit” of hardware abstraction that a server OS manages has now reached the “datacenter” level. And by that I mean a datacenter ranging from the smallest cluster of a few servers to the very massive footprint of one of Microsoft’s global installations with thousands of servers across multiple geographically distributed datacenters.
In response to the needs of large-scale service providers pushing the limits of technology every day, networking, storage and compute vendors have responded by delivering significant innovations to help increase scale, performance and to help remove bottlenecks. These industries have all driven this transformation in parallel. Now, we must think beyond a server at a time and instead look at the OS as the driver of the datacenter. Today’s datacenter is a scalable, intelligent, automated environment spanning all of the shared resources, and it is the magic of software that brings this all together to orchestrate the three resources of the datacenter: network, storage and compute. In other words, a cloud OS.
Just as the job of managing hardware has been transformed, the job of running applications has also shifted. We live in an era of many devices, where applications need to span across PCs to phones to tablets with an adaptive backend that can keep it all together. The ways in which we interact with those applications – and by that I mean both through touch and swipe and click AND through “likes”, “follows” and “shares” – pushes us forward. And the huge amounts of data that feed and enable these modern applications through the cloud needs to be managed. Again, the need for a cloud OS.
Microsoft has been at the center of this transformation. As a large-scale service provider, we’ve been experiencing all of these changes real time, in our datacenters and through our services, learning and applying those learnings to what we build even as we work with the industry to push the limits of the technology. Our conversation since that first TechEd, and the focus on the operating system, isn’t new: the OS is still the intelligence that makes it all work. What has changed is the scale, the scope, and the range of the infrastructure OS to deliver against the opportunities the cloud presents. With Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure, we’ve taken everything we’ve learned from running datacenters and services at global scale and are delivering the next generation of operating systems – the “cloud OS” – to help our customers seize the opportunities of the cloud.
I’m looking forward to talking a lot more about this new era of the cloud OS at TechEd this week and how we are helping customers make the very most of this transition. If you aren’t able to join us live in Orlando this week, I hope you’ll have a chance to view the keynotes online. It’s an exciting time to be in IT!
From: Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander: TechEd 2012 Day 1 Keynote [speech transcripts, June 11, 2012]
SATYA NADELLA:
… what we are going to discuss over the next 90 minutes, the modern datacenter, the modern application framework that make up the cloud operating system, the basic underpinnings for this new era of connected devices and continuous services.
When you talk about the modern datacenter, it’s perhaps best to start with what’s happening at the system level, what’s happening at the silicon, what’s happening to a single blade, a single system, and then a cluster.
The fundamental thing that all of us at this point are tracking pretty closely is the notion that storage, compute, and network are co-evolving. I mean, if you think about the compute power, for sure Moore’s Law is still continuing to work in its full glory. It probably is resulting in more core density versus perhaps single-thread performance, but still we’re able to pack amazing amounts of compute power.
Once you have a lot of compute power, there is not much use to it if you can’t really have the IOPS that have to go with it. And so the revolution in storage, especially around tiering, is what’s really in full play, because the disk speed itself is not something that’s going to faster, but at the same time the fact that SSD costs and Flash costs are coming down give us a huge opportunity to rethink, especially if you think about what’s happening in the database world with in-memory, you can sort of see that you can start thinking about applications and application performance and IOPS per dollar in a very different way in terms of the nexus between CPU utilization and storage access.
But one of the things which is really an artifact of the CPU to storage connection is the network. It’s the fast interconnect, it’s sort of the era of the fast interconnect between storage and compute that’s driving a lot of innovation.
And the key to this co-evolution of storage, compute and network is really software control. You really cannot afford to have the control fragmentation, because if you do that then you’re not going to be able to achieve the economic benefits, the agility benefits and the innovation benefits that these new systems at high density can provide.
Now, perhaps you can sort of say, well, that’s something that’s been true. After all, Moore’s Law has really played this out even in the past, over the last 10 years in particular as we have gone to these clusters and blades and software-based solutions, but one of the fundamental things that I believe has changed is services at scale, and this is a very big difference for me personally since 1993. When we were building Windows NT, we didn’t have in-house at scale workloads on NT. Subsequently we got onto a fantastic virtuous cycle, which is the fact that we had hit workloads in Exchange, in Lync, in SharePoint, in SQL Server ensured that with each release of our server operating system we were able to get the feedback from you and learn continuously from you and make that product better and better and better and more robust, and that’s sort of testament to sort of all the deployments that we have.
But for the first time now the same kind of cycle of learning is playing out when we talk about Internet scale services. Just think about the depth and breadth of the first-party workloads that Microsoft is running today on a daily basis. We have Xbox LIVE that’s doing some fascinating GPU simulation in the cloud for some of their games. You have Office 365 which is Exchange and SharePoint at scale. You have Dynamics CRM which is a stateful transactional application in the cloud. You have Bing, which is really a big data-applied machine learning application in the cloud. You have things like HealthVault, which is secure transactional consumer applications. So, you have a very broad spectrum. So, we run approximately 200 very diverse workloads across Microsoft.
That diversity is what’s really making us build the right operating systems, the right management stack, the right tools. In fact, perhaps the best way to illustrate it is what happens to us on a daily basis. For example, just in terms of the physical plant we have around 16 major datacenters across the globe, we have around a thousand access points, we have a couple of hundred megawatts of power powering hundreds of thousands of machines. We have terabits of network out of our datacenters. We have petabytes of data. In fact, Bing itself has got approximately 300 petabytes of data. We write something like 1 terabyte of records each day.
Now, all of that you could say is fascinating statistics; what does that really have to do anything with infrastructure that we build? It’s just that we are battle-testing every piece of software. Just, in fact, last week, we upgraded all of the Bing front ends to Windows Server 2012 RC. And so today, Bing is running the release candidate of the next server operating system in full production workload.
That type of feedback where we are constantly able to take the learning internally is what’s shaping the host OS, the guest OS, the frameworks, the tools, the performance, and that we believe is not something you can easily — you can’t just head fake it, you can’t just go in and say we’ve built it for scale without having run if yourself, and I think that that’s perhaps in the long run going to make one of the biggest distinctions.
Of course, none of this matters if you can’t scale minimize it, because it’s not as if every deployment of a private cloud or a virtualization instance is going to be at the scale we run. So, the key is for us to be able to take all of that power, all of that learning, package it up into the smallest of clusters, half a rack, a full rack or what have you, and that’s really what our intent is.
And when you think about that as the backdrop, the criteria to look at a modern datacenter, there are four key attributes that I would say that one should look at. The first one is the scalability and the elasticity, and you need the elasticity to go with it, especially in the context of a heterogeneous set of workloads when you’re running in particular highly virtualized distributed environments, because you want to get utilization up and without elasticity you’re not going to be able to achieve i