Tech.Ed plenary plugs private cloud

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 31 August 2011 07:22

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft officials took advantage of a plenary session at the company's Tech.Ed conference to preview some features of Windows Server 8 and System Center 2012.

During a plenary session at Microsoft Australia's Tech.Ed conference, Phil Goldie, server and tools business director, claimed that three out of four servers shipped and deployed in Australia run Windows Server, and that Hyper-V has a 30% share of deployed systems and its use is growing twice as fast as the market. He also said that by 2012 Coles will be running 750 stores on Hyper-V under System Center.

Full details of Windows Server 8 won't be released until the Build conference in Anaheim next month, but a video clip presented during the plenary session described support for more (at least 16) virtual processors, and simplified disaster recovery capabilities. Hyper-V Replica will handle replication to in-house or external sites, allowing administrators to specify which disks are replicated and the interval between ake a snapshots. It will give the option of using a local drive as the target for initial replication to save bqandwidth, and will handle off-site replication even while the server is under very heavy load.

System Center 2012 is also expected to be announced at Build. Mr Goldie noted that System Center is a $1bn business for Microsoft globally.

IT pro evangelist Jeff Alexander told the audience developers just want to make their applications available to the business, and so system administrators need to avoid situations where people within the organisation work around them and use external cloud providers.

While virtualisation provides a path to the cloud, concepts such as just-in-time self-service and infrastructure-as-a-service are important parts of the model, said Mr Alexander. Cloud computing is usage based, scalable and elastic (up, out and down; with chargeback), shared, and self-service, he said. "We're investing in all these areas."

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