November 18th, 2009

So where's Microsoft's Live Mesh?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:38 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Live Mesh, PDC 2009, Utility/cloud computing, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Zune

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Web Site Development, Benefits, Channel Management, Operating Systems, Software, Internet

One noticeable no-show at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is Live Mesh.

Live Mesh, Microsoft’s synchronization service that is the pet project of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, was one of the main attractions at previous Microsoft developers’ conferences. When Microsoft first described the service, it was billed as a way to prove to consumers that Microsoft’s Azure cloud would have something of interest to them and not just business customers and developers.

Earlier this year, as part of one of the company’s many reorgs, Microsoft moved the Live Mesh team under the Windows/Windows Live group. Since then, things have gone quiet.

At the PDC this week, I (and others) thought Microsoft might give us a progress report on Live Mesh… or a demo of the latest version of it… or a roadmap for it… or something. But no.

I had a chance to ask Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie about Live Mesh during a one-on-one interview with him at the show on November 17. I asked Ozzie why there was nothing about Mesh at the PDC. He said:

“We’re pushing the Live platform stuff to Mix. Or I shouldn’t actually say Mix, in terms of that, it is going to be spring….The Live stuff and phone stuff basically is out in that time frame.

“But that (Live Mesh) will no longer be discussed in the context of ‘Live Mesh,’ but rather in ‘the Windows Live platform,’ which is now, as you know, which it’s now part of.

I asked Ozzie a follow-up: If you aren’t using Live Mesh any more as a way to get consumers excited about the Azure platform, what’s the new plan to push the “commercialization of IT” strategy with Azure? Ozzie’s response:

“(T)he reality is — I know this isn’t very sexy — but I don’t think people are really going to be aware that it (Azure) is there. I think when people go to Web sites, they’ll just go to a Web site. They won’t really know what it’s connected to. When they use a phone or a piece of client software or a TV or a cable box that happens to talk to a cloud back end, it will just happen. And the way they will experience it is it will be reliable, it will be fast, it will scale.

“Probably the most important thing is that we live in a very faddish culture,… Whenever there is a service that’s backing up something that’s very trendy, these things will just happen without any issues. There will be black Friday and everyone wants to just buy their Beanie Baby and they’ll be able to.”

So if Live Mesh isn’t the consumer proof point for Windows Azure, what is? Ozzie said:

“(T)he best example I have is this app that (Microsoft Online Systems Division President) Qi Lu announced at Web 2.0 some weeks ago with Bing/Twitter integration. That came together in a very short time.

“In just a few weeks, a few developers got together and they had the Twitter fire hose, because of our relationship with — an early relationship with Twitter, and suddenly because of Azure, they were able to ingest this whole thing and start to do some amazing analysis that they could have never done if they had to, let’s see, how many machines should we order? When do we get them configured? When can we have rack space in GFS (Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services)? Those apps just never would have happened. And that’s why I’m so excited about this Dallas stuff because even though it is obscure, it’s hard to give compelling examples of how to use that data, once people have the ability to make a discovery based on data and then scale it to lots and lots of data, I think new possibilities are opened up.

“I think consumers are going to experience the benefit of the apps. Just take the H1N1 thing that’s going on right now. I’m not sure exactly what the benefit will be, but when there are these large challenges, suddenly some new app may be overlaid on maps or maybe it’s an app on a map that brings together some health data with geo data or an industry that you work in or something like that will pop up, and we’ll take it for granted at the time when it happens, but it will never have been able to happen without all that data behind it.”

When I recently asked some execs in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division — the folks behind Windows Mobile and Zune — about their plans for implementing Live Mesh, I didn’t get a sense they had any real, near-term plans (and I don’t think they were just being cagey).

I’m really wondering what’s going to happen with Live Mesh going forward. Any guesses/hopes?

November 17th, 2009

What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:47 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Google, Management tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Data Center, Microsoft Corp., Data Centers, Microsoft Windows, Storage, Operating Systems, Hardware, Data Management, Software

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own “private clouds”?

Microsoft officials didn’t share dates for its next phases of the Windows Azure platform. But they did talk about some of their plans for their next steps with Microsoft’s cloud platform during meetings and sessions at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on November 17.

Microsoft said the Windows Azure platform — which is the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database — is feature-complete as of today. (Officials said a few weeks ago that Microsoft wouldn’t begin charging customers to use the platform until February 1, 2010.)

“Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it,” said Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure. These kinds of applications are Xcopy-deployable, while older, legacy apps typically are not, Srivastava said.

Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform. (The name of this VM capability will be “Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure,” Microsoft execs later told me.)

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said.

Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications.

Not everything about what’s next for Azure is a longer-term direction. In sessions on November 17, Microsoft officials outlined some of the nearer term deliverables for Microsoft’s cloud platform. The recently introduced content-delivery-network (CDN) support for blobs in Windows Azure’s storage system is one of those deliverables. Another is a capability MIcrosoft is calling “Windows Azure Drive” (also known as Xdrive) which allows Azure developers to create a drive inside their virtual machines, providing them with an automatic back up capability. Microsoft plans to officially “turn on” Xdrive support in January, officials said.

November 17th, 2009

Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:09 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: SDK, Vision, Microsoft Corp., Dataset, Microsoft Windows, .Net, Operating Systems, Software, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Any Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) wouldn’t be complete without a few new codenames. On November 17, Microsoft introduced three new ones that all are related to Microsoft’s evolving cloud-computing vision and infrastructure.

During the Day One set of keynotes, Microsoft officials attempted to explain further how the company’s three-screens-and-a-cloud vision will take shape in product and service form.

Last year, when it rolled out its first Windows Azure Community Technology Preview, Microsoft showed a “layer cake” type diagram which showed all of the various Azure layers and components as a comprehensive whole. (See last year’s layer cake at right.)

This year, there was no diagram. The new message is that Microsoft’s cloud is comprised of Windows Azure (the Red Dog operating system), SQL Azure and a new AppFabric development platform. That’s it. Gone are the Live Services, .Net Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services that wer all part of the original platform.

Did Microsoft decide its original vision was too ambitious? It seems more the case that it has decided some of the original pieces didn’t belong as part of the core Azure platform, such as Live Services, which are now part of Windows/Windows Live. In other cases, Microsoft has repackaged other elements of its original platform in different ways (example: the slimmed-down .Net Services is now part of AppFabric).

In the midst of all this movement, Microsoft introduced the three new cloud-related codenames today. How do they fit into Microsoft’s newly flattened cloud cake?

* Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example. Sydney is slated to go to beta early next year and go final in 2010.

* Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications. The datasets are available via Microsoft’s PinPoint partner/ISV site. Dallas is hosted on Azure already and is available as of today as an invitation-only CTP. No word on when Microsoft is hoping to release the final version of the service.

* AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services). The version of the Windows Server AppFabric on-premises version of the product is available for download today, with final availability slated for 2010. Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows Azure AppFabric version are slated to be available during 2010. No word on when the final Azure-based version will be out. (Note: The CTPs of the Access Control and Service Bus technologies are still available separately in CTP form today.)

Microsoft made available last week a November release of its own Windows Azure SDK and related tools. The new releases include an update to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, which extends VS 2008 and VS2010 Beta 2 so they can create, configure, build, debug and run Web apps and services on Windows Azure.

Roger Jennings, a cloud computing expert and author of the Oakleaf Systems blog said that the November release of the Windows Azure SDK includes “something Azure devs have been asking for and needed to compete with AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud 2): Variable-size virtual machines (VMs). Using that featue, Azure developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role’s resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance, Jennings noted.

In a similar vein, Amazon quietly released on November 11 version 1.0 of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) software development kit for .Net. The SDK allows developers to “get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with VIsual Studio project templates, the AWS .Net library, C# code samples and documentation,” according to a note Amazon forwarded me over the weekend.

November 16th, 2009

Microsoft makes available new high performance Windows Server test build

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:00 am

Categories: Azure, Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Office 2010/Office 14, Red Dog, Resellers, System builders, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Windows Server, High-performance, Server, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Supercomputing, HPC Server, Leadership, Management

Microsoft made available on November 16 a code-complete beta of Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008 R2 to selected testers.

The company made the announcement at the Supercomputing 2009 show in Portland, Oreg., where officials said they planned to provide all of the 4,500 or so of the attendees with the bits today. Microsoft also will be providing select testers with access to the downloadable beta via the Connect site today. Microsoft is expecting to release at least one more beta of HPC Server 2008 R2 before rolling out the final version some time in 2010.

HPC Server enables cluster supercomputing on x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 R2. The new release that is in testing is Microsoft’s third iteration of the product.

With the HPC Server 2008 R2 beta, testers can run the test builds of Excel 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, supporting the development and use of parallel and scalable applications, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft and its partners have been making a concerted effort to increase the appeal of its HPC Server product beyond the small segment of scientists and engineers who typically use supercomputers. Last week, Dell announced it would be the exclusive distributor of the Cray CX1 supercomputing workstation, which runs Windows 7 integrated with HPC Server on a single box.

“We’re trying to make HPC more mainstream and accessible” to more engineers, financial quants and others in a variety of large and mid-size organizations, said Vince Mendillo, Microsoft Senior Director of High Performance Computing. To do this, the team is focused on providing new tools and techniques making HPC Server easier to set up and deploy, Mendillo said.

When Microsoft introduced the first version of HPC Server, Linux dominated the supercomputing market. Since then, Microsoft has been making inroads in market share and performance. Last year, Microsoft added “thousands of customers in large scale organizations” for the product, Mendillo said. (He declined provide any more specific data.) Microsoft now has 159 independent software vendor partners developing applications for HPC Server, Mendillo added.

Because HPC Server is part of the overall Windows Server family, MIcrosoft will fold back into the core Windows Server codebase new developments made by the HPC team. Mendillo said that some of the new parallel enhancements in the new HPC Server release would likely be useful to the Windows Azure team, which is building MIcrosoft’s cloud-computing offering.

November 12th, 2009

PDC 2009: Tune in for our live blogging frenzy next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Research, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Developers Conference Keynote, Blogging, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 kicks off the week of November 16. Like we did last year, a handful of us Microsoft watchers will be live blogging the keynotes as a group.

The PDC keynotes are slated for Tuesday November 17 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT and Wednesday November 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. We’ll be using CoverItLive to blog, so the more of you who chime in and comment along with us, the merrier. Your group-blogging hosts (besides me) will be Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and Long Zheng

Come back here next week and watch along with us as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie; Server and Tools President Bob Muglia; Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft’s Office Business Productivity Group and more talk about what’s coming for developers in the next year. (I’ll post the CoverItLive viewer on my site during keynote viewing hours next week.)

There will be new info on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment, .Net 4.0, Oslo, Office 2010, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. And more than a few of the “Big Brains” — Microsoft’s Technical Fellows — are on tap to present during the four-day confab.  I’ve already posted about some of what’s on tap (and not on tap) for PDC 2009 over the past few weeks. Expect lots more PDC news on my blog throughout the week next week.

Hope to see you (virtually) and/or live in Los Angeles next week!

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft 'Geneva' identity wares approach the finish line

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:35 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, Security, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: Geneva, Microsoft Corp., Research & Development, .Net, Microsoft Windows, Application Servers, Development Tools, Middleware, Business Operations, Software Development

Microsoft is making available for download the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of its “Geneva” framework, the technology officially known as Windows Identity Foundation.

(For all you Microsoft codename trackers out there, “Geneva” is the next version of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). The programming framework supporting the next version of ADFS originally was codenamed “Zermatt,” then, later, also took on the “Geneva” codename. Microsoft’s Windows Cardspace is the third component of what Microsoft calls “Geneva.”)

On November 6, Microsoft released the RC bits of the framework, which are designed to provide developers with a new programming model and software development kit for creating identity-aware .Net applications. According to a blog post on the Forefront Team Blog, Windows Identity Foundation “provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) applications.

Geneva and the Geneva framework also are related to Microsoft’s Azure environment, as the next version of ADFS is part of the Azure Services layer in Microsoft’s cloud. (Microsoft’s current Azure diagrams don’t show ADFS as part of Azure, but I hear any new ones we see at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November will include it.) The goal of Geneva is to provide developers and users with a single, secure sign-in capability across both cloud-based and on-premise applications.

In other PDC-related news, Microsoft is planning to distribute a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Oslo modeling platform. This will be the first CTP that team has provided since May and it will require Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 Beta 2 to work. It’s due out on November 17. (Thanks to MVP Doug Finke for unearthing the Oslo link.)

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft to show off new visualization language at PDC

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Research

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Tool, Visualization Language, Vedea, MSCSS, Productivity, Blogging, Data Management, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is planning to show off a new visualization language, codenamed “Vedea” at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in mid-November.

From a blog posting by Microsoft UK Researcher Martin Calsyn.

“Vedea is a new language for creating interactive data-driven visualizations… Vedea will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at PDC 09 November 16-19 in Los Angeles and should be broadly available from research.microsoft.com shortly thereafter.”

Best I can tell, the language seems to be a project of the Microsoft Research Computational Science Laboratory. That unit is the team behind the Microsoft Compututational Science Studio (MSCSS), a “a tool for enabling non-programmer scientists and researchers to harness vast amounts of storage and compute power for running the multi-scale models that are needed to truly understand and predict complex natural systems.”

MSCSS s a shell into which you plug in extensions – for visualization, data management, computation, modelling, and more, Calsyn explained in his post. He added:

“One extension might give you access to remote data on Azure; another might allow you to draw heat-maps over Virtual Earth; and another might support Perfect Plasticity Approximation models or computations on the Hadley climate model data .”

MSCSS was one of the tools that Craig Mundie demonstrated during his university tour this past week. Mundie told the Seattle Times that tools like MSCSS would do for scientists what Excel did for business folks: Make t easier to analyze vast amounts of technical data.

I’m not sure whether Vedea is an outgrowth of an existing Microsoft Research project or something brand-new.  Microsoft showed off Vedea privately at the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop 2009 in mid-October.

There are lots of interesting directions Microsoft could take Vedea. Check out some of the visualization links on Calsyn’s blog page for references to other visualization projects, including the open-source “Processing” visualization language, which is being taught in an increasing number of universities.

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft puts more Azure cloud plumbing in place

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:39 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Content Delivery, Content Delivery Network, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to lay the groundwork for the commercial version of its Azure cloud environement, rolling out a new content delivery network (CDN) capability, as well as the November update to its Azure developer services.

On November 5, Microsoft delivered the November Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Service Bus and Access Control Service — both of which are feature-complete. Those two elements are known as .Net Services. (Workflow services, queuing and routers also originally were set to be part of the first .Net Services release, but the team decided to pull those components in order to sync with Microsoft’s .Net 4.0 release, due out in March, 2010.)

Microsoft also rolled out on November 5 a new CDN capability that extends the storage piece of the Windows Azure cloud operating system.

(A quick refresher: Windows Azure, codenamed “Red Dog” is what networks and manages the set of Windows Server 2008 machines that comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud. At the highest level, Red Dog consists of four “pillars”: Storage (like a file system); the “fabric controller,” which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Red Dog on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it. Azure services including .Net Services and SQL Azure sit on top of the Windows Azure operating system)

The new Windows Azure CDN is designed to allow developers to deliver high-bandwidth content more quickly and efficiently. Here are more details from a November 5 blog post by Brad Calder, who is a leader of the Windows Azure Storage team:

“Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

“The benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. In addition, Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events.”

For the remaining CTP period, Windows Azure CDN access will remain free to testers. (Pricing information isn’t yet available.) Microsoft is recommending caching blobs less than 10 GB in size for best performance.

Speaking of the remaining CTP period, while Microsoft officials have said for the past few months that they planned to remove the beta tag from Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November, Microsoft isn’t closing the CTP until the end of December. Developers and customers won’t be charged for Azure until February, 2010.

November 5th, 2009

Billing system testing behind Microsoft's SQL Azure outage this week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:51 pm

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Database, PDC 2009, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing

Tags: Billing, SQL, Billing System, Microsoft Corp., Outage, Manufacturing, Programming Languages, Databases, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Testers of Microsoft’s SQL Azure service experienced a three-plus hour unplanned outage this week — just a couple of weeks before Microsoft is set to remove the beta tag from its Azure cloud service.

During prior Azure outages (planned and unplanned), the team made sure to blog about the causes. This week’s outage, which occurred on the opening day of Microsoft’s SQL PASS user group conference, received no mention (other than a brief acknowledgment on the MSDN SQL Azure forums).

A tester wondering what happened sent me a note. From his e-mail:

“Microsoft didn’t formally acknowledge the problem until the outage was almost resolved. That’s 3+ hours wondering when the cloud would recover. Still no details on what happened.”

When I asked about what was behind the outage, I received the following note back from an Azure spokesperson:

“We were doing testing on the connection of the central billing platform yesterday and unfortunately experienced some downtime with SQL Azure. When discovered, we notified (Community Technology Preview) CTP customers right away and within a few hours had the service back online.”

Yes, Azure and SQL Azure are still in the test phase. But Microsoft is trying to lay the groundwork to get consumers, developers and enterprise customers to trust the availability, reliability and privacy guarantees of the service. Speaking of privacy guarantees, Microsoft published today a white paper outlining the company’s privacy policies for cloud computing.

SQL Azure will be feature-complete by November, the Softies have said, and testers will have the option of rolling over existing projects seamlessly to the fully supported production environment and a paid subscription to the SQL Azure Database service.

Microsoft officials have said to expect the company to remove the beta tag from Azure by mid-November. Last week, the Softies said that the company will go public with a number of new Windows Azure features on November 17 during the company’s Professional Developers Conference. The Azure CTP will remain open through December 31. Customers won’t be charged for Azure usage in January, but as of February 1, Microsoft will begin charging customers for using Windows Azure.

Microsoft provided Azure pricing details earlier this year.

November 3rd, 2009

Microsoft to raise prices, add more high-end editions with SQL Server 2008 R2

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:04 am

Categories: Azure, Channel, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, OEMs, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, Resellers, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows server

Tags: Processor, Microsoft SQL Server, Server, Microsoft Corp., Datacenter Edition, Microsoft SQL Server Team, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software

With the new version of its database due out by mid-2010, Microsoft is increasing its retail prices. It also is adding two new high-end editions of SQL Server 2008 R2 to its line-up.

Microsoft is planning to make the next Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of SQL Server 2008 R2 — which will be feature-complete — available later this month, but officials declined to specify a date. The timing is “aligned with” the public beta of Office 2010, which many are expecting around mid-month. Customers can sign up today for notification about the November SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP. Microsoft released a first CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 (codenamed “Kilimanjaro”) in August.

Microsoft went public with these details on the opening day of its PASS Summit, its SQL Server user group conference, on November 3.

The two new versions of SQL Server will be a Datacenter edition and a Parallel Data Warehouse edition (formerly codenamed “Project Madison”). The Datacenter edition builds on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise product, but adds application and multi-server management; virtualization; high-scale complex event processing (via StreamInsight); and supports more than 8 processors and up to 256 logical processors. The Parallel Data Warehouse version will be sold preloaded on servers as a data warehouse appliance. Using the DataAllegro technology Microsoft acquired in 2008, it will scale customers’ data warehouses from the tens of terabytes, up to one petabyte plus range, according to the company.

Microsoft isn’t increasing the Server/Client Access License (CAL) pricing — which is the primary way its customers buy SQL Server, officials said — with the new release. But the new SQL 2008 R2 retail pricing is as follows:

Standard: $7,500 (Per Processor), or $100/Server + $162/CAL (a $1,500 increase over SQL 2008 Standard)
Enterprise $28,800 (Per Processor), or $9.900/Server + $162/CAL (a $3,800 increase over SQL 2008 Enterprise)
Datacenter $57,500 (Per Processor), Not offered via Server/CAL (no previous version available)
Parallel Data Warehouse: $57,500 (Per Processor), Not offered via Server/CAL (no previous version available)

No pricing information was available for other R2 versions of SQL Server, including the Workgroup, Web and Developer, company officials said. For the four aforementioned versions, there will be discounts available for customers purchasing via volume licenses, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft’s SQL Server team has focused on pricing as one of its main differentiators from its database competition, especially Oracle, so any kind of price increase is a sensitive topic. Company officials said they hadn’t “adjusted” database prices since the introduction of SQL Server 2005. Microsoft is still not charging per core like Oracle does; instead, it charges per processor, which benefits users who run databases on multicore servers.

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