July 8th, 2009
Microsoft updates more of its hosted services infrastructure
As Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) closes in, more elements of the company’s Azure cloud platform and hosted Online services are being sorted out.
As Ars Technica reported earlier this week, Microsoft has rolled out its July update to its Online Services family. (Microsoft Online encompasses the Microsoft-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Communications Server and other prodcuts. These services are not yet hosted on top of Microsoft’s Azure operating system; they run on Windows Server in various Microsoft datacenters.)
The July Online Services update includes a number of new features, including worldwide user provisioning, support for bigger SharePoint file uploads and more. Microsoft also is adding trials of these services for users in India, with commercial availability there slated for this fall.
Meanwhile on the Azure side of the house, Microsoft has changed yet again the name of its database component that’s built into the Azure Services Platform. Once known as SQL Server Data Services and then SQL Data Services, the newly renamed database piece is now “Microsoft SQL Azure Database.” Earlier this year, Microsoft went back to the drawing board with this component, announcing plans to make it more of a hosted version of SQL Server, rather than a clone of Amazon’s SimpleDB.
Microsoft also announced that the underlying storage component that is part of the Azure OS itself also has been rebranded as Microsoft SQL Azure. (I believe this is the technology formerly codenamed “Cosmos.”)
(Thanks to Windows-Now’s Robert McLaws for the pointer on the latest rebranding.)
Microsoft also is expected to talk up some of its plans around making its hosted services available to customers who want to run them on-premise in “private clouds” during next week’s partner show. Company officials also are likely to talk up some of the new test versions of the interoperability components of Azure there, as well.
Microsoft is on tap to outline Azure pricing and licensing, and to explain how its partners fit into its services picture at the New Orleans show next week.
Azure is expected to remove its “beta” tag by November during the company’s Professional Developers Conference.
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