Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson pays close attention to the global sales of x86 servers. And in a post on In the Cloud, he notes that the highest levels of growth point to a rise of the service provider and public cloud. Anderson attributes this to organizations moving to service providers, as well as shifts in enterprise organizations moving to a model that provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for their internal business groups.
“The move to a service provider model is one of the most significant shifts we are seeing in data centers around the world,” writes Anderson in his post.
With that in mind, Microsoft concentrated "2012 R2" efforts on enabling service providers to build out a highly-available, highly-scalable IaaS infrastructure.
“IaaS was a critical area where we could make a difference for our customers,” said Erin Chapple, Partner Group program manager for Windows Server and System Center team, “This focus on delivering IaaS solutions for service providers (and enterprises that want to act as service providers for their users) became a rallying point across the Windows Server, System Center, and Windows Azure Pack teams.
And rally, they did. Anderson said that with the innovations Microsoft has driven in storage, networking, and compute, the company believes service providers can now build-out an IaaS platform that enables them to deliver virtual machines at 50% of the cost of competitors.
“The work being done with R2’s infrastructure innovations are new benchmark for the scalable, flexible, powerful cloud computing era,” said Anderson.
In the post, Chapple discusses the specific scenarios that were used in the planning process, plus how engineering teams worked through integration and technical challenges in order to deliver on those scenarios with Windows Server 2012 R2.
To get more background and a deeper dive into the details, head over to the In the Cloud blog.
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Deborah Pisano
Microsoft News Center Staff