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 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.

October 29th, 2009

Microsoft adds more choices for developers targeting its Azure cloud

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:05 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Open source, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Developer, Java, SDK, Microsoft Corp., Eclipse, Java Development Tools, Microsoft Windows, Open Source, Development Tools, Software Development

Microsoft is getting its Azure ducks before it removes the beta tag from its cloud service in mid-November.

Update: The Azure team posted a bit of a roadmap update to their blog on October 29. The team noted that the Azure preview will remain open through the end of 2009. Microsoft plans to start charging for Azure usage/hosting as of February 1, 2010.

On October 28, the company announced plans for more development tools aimed at programmers who want to use PHP, Java and the Eclipse IDE to create and modify Web applications for Azure.

At the Eclipse Summit Europe, Microsoft announced a plug-in called the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse which is targeted at PHP developers. The plug-in bundles together the already-announced Azure software-development kit (SDK) for PHP into the Eclipse PHP project.Soyatec is developing the new toolset, with funding and guidance from Microsoft.

The plug-in includes a Window Azure storage explorer so developers can browse data in Windows Azure tables, blobs or queues, according to Microsoft. A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse is available for download now. The final “release to Web” of the toolkit is slated for November.

Microsoft also took the wraps off a new Windows Azure SDK for Java on Wednesday. The SDK is being developed by Soyatec in conjunction with Microsoft.  A CTP of the Soyatec SDK for Java is available for download; the final release-to-Web version is slated for November.

(Microsoft and another partner, Schakra, also are developing a Java SDK for Azure. This original SDK is targeting Azure .Net Services, while the new toolkit from Soyatek is targeting Windows Azure, the OS layer of Azure, which was codenamed Red Dog. Microsoft recently decided to pull workflow services out of the Azure .Net Services layer, so as to wait for the final .Net 4 release, slated for late March. A new CTP of the Schakra Java SDK is slated for November. There’s no word on when the final release will be done.)

In other Eclipse-related news, Microsoft and solution provider Tasktop Technologies announced they will be developing updates to the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to take advantage of new features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Tasktop will contribute enhancements to the Eclipse IDE that will be available under the Eclipse Public License for early access the first quarter of 2010; general release is slated to happen as part of the Eclipse Helios release in June 2010. Microsoft is funding the project.

While Microsoft continues to put more of its Azure pieces in place prior to its PDC launch, its foremost competitor, Amazon.com, is continuing to roll out more elements of its own cloud computing environment that are squarely targeted at Microsoft. Earlier this week, Amazon announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) beta. As cloud-computing maven Roger Jennings explained in a blog post, Amazon is now delivering pre-configured MySQL 5.1 instances with up to 68 GB of memory and 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each) servicing up to 1 TB of data storage

October 7th, 2009

When will Microsoft's Live Mesh matter?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:16 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Live Mesh, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows client, Xbox, Zune

Tags: Team, Microsoft Corp., Team Management, Management, Mary Jo Foley

It was April 2008 when Microsoft rolled out a first beta of its Live Mesh synchronization/backup software. The promise was Live Mesh would help users more seamlessly integrate ther PCs, phones, digital picture frames, Xbox consoles — the whole gamut — and not just devices from Microsoft. It sounded almost as though Live Mesh was a precursor to, if not the heart of, the whole three-screens-and-a-cloud strategy Microsoft execs have been increasingly touting.

But maybe not. This week, I asked some of the executives and teams participating in Microsoft’s consumer open-house showcase in New York about how and when they planned to start making use of Live Mesh. The stammers and blank stares said a lot to me.

I asked Robbie Bach, the President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division about how and when he expected teams in his unit to take advantage of Live Mesh. He didn’t have a whole lot to say. He noted that Live Mesh is more plumbing/infrastructure than something Microsoft plans to offer as a new product or service directly to consumers.

“My Phone (Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile service for provisioning and securing phones) is not using all of Mesh today,” Bach said. Sometime, Microsoft could use Mesh to help replicate files and other information across multiple devices, he said. But that’s going to happen “tomorrow,” Bach said.

Not to be a contrarian, but I’m actually not sure that My Phone is using Live Mesh today, either. I asked Aaron Woodman, Director of Product Management for Windows Mobile about the WinMo team’s intentions around Live Mesh and got a similarly vague statement.

“From a techncal standpoint, Live Mesh is important,” Woodman said. “But it’s more about plumbing. It’s not something we will put in front of consumers.”

A year ago, members of the Mesh team were contemplating how to make consumer devices like Zune and Xbox part of a user’s Mesh. (In other words, to make the kinds of scenarios highlighted in this much-shared Live Mesh marketing/promotional video a reality.) But how and when is this going to happen?

Microsoft has continued to provide beta updates to Live Mesh for the past year and a half. There’s a Live Mesh software development kit out there. Testers who are using the Live Mesh beta seem to really love it, from feedback I’ve gotten. Undeniably, something is changing with Mesh — strategy and/or technology-wise Microsoft has been moving supporting Live Services components of its Azure cloud environment around as of late. But the Softies claim Live Mesh is alive and well and not a victim of the product/head-count cuts Microsoft has been making.

Given the champion of Live Mesh is none other than Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie himself, you’d think product teams at Microsoft would be falling all over themselves to Mesh-ify their products and services.Maybe Microsoft will have something tangible to show and say at the Professional Developers Conference in November, given that it would be the perfect place to talk about Live Platforms Services and the “Live Mesh Cloud.”

But when Mesh will actually figure in Microsoft’s products/services line-up is anyone’s guess at this point.

September 23rd, 2009

Windows 8: More early clues start to emerge

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:34 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Management tools, Microsoft Big Brains, Red Dog, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Windows 8, Windows 8 Server, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Corp., Chapman Co., Windows 8, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Servers, Software, Hardware, Mary Jo Foley

As soon as Microsoft releases the final bits of a new Windows release to manufacturing — and often before — many users’ thoughts turn to what’s next.

Windows 7 and its server complement, Windows Server 2008 R2, were released to manufacturing in late July. By late August, Microsoft’s Windows client unit already was turning the crank on Windows 8 client and server.

Anders Vindberg, a Microsoft Technical Fellow in Microsoft’s Management and Services division — a “Big Brains” interview with whom I’ll be posting soon — acknowledged that planning sessions were well underway for Windows 8. And of the 12 working groups created, “eight or nine revolve around management.” (Back in April of this year, Microsoft was seeking developers interested in working on some of these management features and enhancements to Distributed File System Replication for Windows 8.)

Stephen Chapman, a tech enthusiast who runs the UX Evangelist site, has been beating the bushes for a few months now for Windows 8 information. He recently unearthed a number of job profiles of folks who have worked on and are working on various elements which may or may not make it into the final Windows 8 release.

Chapman found listings regarding tweaks being made to the Hibernate/Resume/Integration programming interface “that can integrate and utilize the new TLZ file compression engine.” (I’m not really sure what TLZ means here. I found a reference to TLZ as a file extension for Tar (.TAR) file compressed with LZMA (.LZMA) file compression “most commonly used on Unix systems.”)

He also found a reference to more tweaks that Microsoft is making around kernel patch protection, via PatchGuard. Chapman blogged that, based on what he unearthed, “PatchGuard is apparently going to make life even a little more difficult for hackers (and anti-virus companies as well, perhaps).”

Things are happening on the Windows 8 Server front, too. It seems that the Dublin application server that Microsoft has been readying might find its way into Windows 8 Server, based on another online resume Chapman found. (Microsoft officials said last year that the grand plan for Dublin was to integrate it into Windows Server, but never said when.)

I’ve seen a few Windows 8 references out there focused around the server version that mention new functionality Microsoft is working on to make Windows 8 Server an even stronger datacenter operating system. That dovetails with Microsoft’s slow but steady push toward offering customers not just a public-cloud hosting capability, but also a private one. For Microsoft, a private cloud will revolve around Windows Server. Some of the features/functionality developed by the Windows Azure operating system (Red Dog) team will undoubtedly find their way back into future iterations of Windows Server.

It’s still early. Windows 8 is unlikely to debut until 2011, at the earliest, given the way Microsoft is delivering Windows releases these days. I’ll be interested as to how Microsoft execs characterize Windows 8, given they decided to deem Windows 7 a “major” release and Windows Server 2008 R2 a “minor” one.

Anyone else hearing any scuttlebutt yet on Windows 8? What are you hoping gets included in the next Windows client and server releases?

September 21st, 2009

Microsoft trims MVP benefits, allows shareholders say on executives' pay

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:10 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Management tools, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Windows client

Tags: Shareholder, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Benefits, Financial Accounting, Operating Systems, Software, Human Resources, Finance, Mary Jo Foley

Instead of trying (and failing) to do full blog posts on the many different Microsoft news bits I’ve read recently, I decided to do a quick link list. Here are a few new items that might be of interest:

Microsoft is trimming some of the benefits it is offering to participants in its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program, no doubt due to cost-cutting measures affecting the company overall. In a note to MVPs (posted on the ActiveWin.com site), Microsoft claims to be “expanding our investment in the MVP Award Program” with a new online MVP portal coming next year. But in the same note, officials acknowledge that they are cutting a number of the “less significant” benefits, as of October 1, including Company Store (MVP Bucks), E-Academy, E-Reference Library and MS Press Book Reviews. The worldwide MVP conference is not cancelled; it’s on for mid-February 2010 (but in Redmond/Bellevue, not in Seattle).

Microsoft is allowing shareholders to have a formal say about its executives’ compensation. In Microsoft’s case, the “say on pay” input will be collected once every three years. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just got a 4 percent raise for fiscal 2009, by the way (not counting bonuses). Microsoft is one of a growing list of public companies adopting the say-for-pay provision. The first nonbinding vote on executive compensation happens in conjunction with this year’s shareholders’ meeting on November 19.

Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky is slated to release a book later this year, co-authored with Harvard management professor Marco Iansiti that will offer insights into how to make a large organization not just survive, but thrive. The book will be published by John Wiley & Sons. Think of it a detailed analysis of Microsoft’s Windows client unit — which Sinofsky reorganized and pruned in order to get Windows 7 done in a timely way and to create the groundwork for future Windows releases. (TechFlash’s Todd Bishop found a Barnes & Noble listing for the forthcoming title,  — tentatively named “One Strategy!” and due November 28.

Microsoft has made available another piece of its Azure cloud platform puzzle: The Azure management API. The API is meant for developers who need to deploy and manage the compute and storage components of the Windows Azure operating system. The Azure management API is REST-based and will allow developers to code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services.

September 16th, 2009

Microsoft launches a 'private cloud' blog

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:38 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Management tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows server

Tags: Data Center, Blog, Microsoft Corp., Data Centers, Blogging, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

For those wondering what Microsoft has up its sleeve, in terms of its “private-cloud” strategy, there’s a new resource worth tracking: The company’s private-cloud blog.

The new blog — which I discovered via another blog (Microsoft’s increasingly prolific Nexus System Center blog) — so far seems to be little more than a site for the Dynamic Data Alliance, a group for Microsoft hosting partners that are building around Microsoft’s Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters.

But here’s how Jeff Wettlaufer, Senior Technical Product Manager for System Center, described the new blog:

“Hey everyone, I just had a chat with our friends over in the Private Cloud Computing Team, and they wanted to let all of you know they now have a team blog. Their blog is intended to be a hub to highlight their partners, customers and internal Microsoft personalities; as well as to promote announcements related to the Dynamic Data Center Toolkits for Hosters & Enterprises, and the Dynamic Data Center Alliance.”

Microsoft has yet to describe any kind of comprehensive private-cloud strategy. So far, company officials have said that Microsoft will enable private-cloud hosting — which, at least in the Microsoft world, so far sounds like not a whole lot more than on-premise datacenter computing to me — via new enhancements the company is making to Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center and its Dyanmic Data Center Toolkits. (The final release of the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Enterprises is slated to be available some time in the first half of 2010).

There is a high-level description of “The Microsoft Private Cloud” on Microsoft’s Web site, however. According to that description Microsoft’s Private Cloud will enable:

• Management of the datacenter fabric as a single pool of resources
• Delivery of scalable applications and workloads
• Focus on the management of the datacenter service and it’s dependencies
• Federation of services across the full cloud continuum

The Microsoft.com/Privatecloud URL currently doesn’t offer up much more; it simply takes you to Microsoft’s virtualization Web site.

Microsoft’s foremost hosting competitor, Amazon.com, seems a lot further along on the private-cloud front. Amazon has in beta something it calls the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows customers to use their private VPNs to access their Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Amazon’s approach to the private cloud seems really different from what little we know so far about Microsoft’s.

I am thinking Microsoft might have more to share about its private cloud plans at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November, given that the PDC will be the launch pad for the first  non-beta release of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Guess we’ll find out soon….