Customers Find Success With Microsoft Private Cloud

[btarunr]

At the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft's private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds."

In addition, Anderson provided a preview of how Microsoft's private cloud will become even more powerful with Windows Server "8" and announced that the operating system will officially be named Windows Server 2012. The new "cloud-optimized OS" is due out later this year.

Management Makes the Difference for Customers
IT organizations that use System Center 2012 and Windows Server with Hyper-V for cloud computing are helping their companies move faster, save money and compete better. For example, EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services, a luxury car service headquartered in New Jersey, has used a Microsoft private cloud to reduce datacenter costs by 50 percent amid 30 percent company growth during the past 18 months. With more than 1,000 employees, EmpireCLS relies on the Microsoft private cloud to deliver a reliable reservation system to customers in more than 700 cities around the world. Using System Center 2012, EmpireCLS also used its cloud environment to create a new business with its BeTransported software as a service offering. The application is now in use broadly within the car service industry.

Similarly, The Walsh Group, a construction firm based in Chicago, switched to a Microsoft private cloud to automate delivery of virtualized servers and applications for 5,000 employees. In addition to business efficiencies, the company has been able to reduce hardware and energy costs by 20 percent.

"With Microsoft, we are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing, so we can automate and manage our IT environment as a whole," said Patrick Wirtz, manager of Technology Innovation at The Walsh Group. "It's all about giving our engineers, tradespeople and software developers the computing resources they need to build roadways, bridges and high-rises."

In another case, Apartments.com, a national online apartment search service in Chicago, needed a more dynamic and responsive IT infrastructure to stay competitive in the market and deliver faster service to its 6 million site visitors each month. With Microsoft's private cloud, the company realized 50 percent faster server provisioning for new services and 75 percent lower licensing costs.

Source: Microsoft

[TheMailMan78]

Hmmm..

I like cloud computing in some aspects but its also seems like a massive train crash waiting to happen under a malice attack. However understanding the security aspects of such a platform are well beyond my pay grade.

Source: TheMailman

[Steevo]

Sold out, I wonder who they gave my tickets to?

[brandonwh64]

Originally Posted by TheMailMan78

Hmmm..

As well as...

Being in the time of day this is with technology, I think the cloud computing scheme is an excellent source of vitamins in your daily diet.

Source

[phanbuey]

cloud products are always really great when they are new and the sh*t hasnt hit the fan yet...

once the farms start aging and you start getting downtime, then the complaints will start to roll in.

And the security aspects of the platform is something that is widely and hotly debated. Basically no one knows what they are really doing, and they hope that they will not be the ones who get hammered.

If you look at many of the cloud companies, they actually open sister companies that host and provide services for that cloud, and those are the ones that the customer actually signs with, so that if something happens the sister company soaks up the legal damage.

[TheMailMan78]

Originally Posted by phanbuey

cloud products are always really great when they are new and the sh*t hasnt hit the fan yet...

once the farms start aging and you start getting downtime, then the complaints will start to roll in.

And the security aspects of the platform is something that is widely and hotly debated. Basically no one knows what they are really doing, and they hope that they will not be the ones who get hammered.

If you look at many of the cloud companies, they actually open sister companies that host and provide services for that cloud, and those are the ones that the customer actually signs with, so that if something happens the sister company soaks up the legal damage.

Yeah that's my fear. Not knowing who to sue.....lol. But really if everything is in one spot and all we have are terminals it allows hackers and stuff to focus on one target. Am I mistaken? Honestly I'm not sure how it works.

[phanbuey]

Originally Posted by TheMailMan78

Yeah that's my fear. Not knowing who to sue.....lol. But really if everything is in one spot and all we have are terminals it allows hackers and stuff to focus on one target. Am I mistaken? Honestly I'm not sure how it works.

Each vendor does it differently... One popular way is doing it with clusters/pods (basically clusters of servers/mini clouds/ behind the scenes), so that your "thin" client actually knows/has an ID which is used to route which pod to connect to, and you share it with a set number of other clients. There is usually a less robust backup of that pod in another data-center somewhere else.

With this structure, for the entire cloud to be compromised would be almost impossible since you would have to hit each pod separately, and they are usually on totally separate networks.

Also its usually hard to outright lose data, since most clouds are replicated and backed up on multiple levels, but it is pretty easy to get your data jacked. I am sure, especially if you have clients connecting with wifi devices (i.e. doctors with iPads).

[Easy Rhino]

Microsoft's Hyper-V has come along way but is still no contest to something like QEMU-KVM for Linux. So no doubt their cloud service still has along way to go when compared to something like EC2.