When you’re one of the world’s biggest software companies, you get a lot of tough questions from both your partners and customers.  Many times these questions are very challenging, and other times they are from the IT Pros that want to keep companies all over the world ticking – and they just want to know how to scale and go mobile.

Brad Anderson (VP of Enterprise Mobility) is one of the experts, and he has scheduled a series of webcasts about Enterprise Mobility to answer the biggest, toughest questions.  Registration is now open – and you can review webcast topics and broadcast dates.

Earlier this year Brad and Mark Russinovich (CTO Azure) did a very popular webcast series about Hybrid Cloud – and this one looks to be just as great.  In the first two webcasts Brad will be joined by Kirk Koenigsbauer (VP Office), and the latter two will feature Active Directory PM Alex Simons.

Enterprise mobility has been a hot topic this year – whether you work on-prem, public cloud, or hybrid.  To see the work MSFT has been hard at work doing, check out Brad’s ongoing Enterprise Mobility blog series.

You can read overviews of each of the four scheduled webcasts and register to watch them here.  Each webcast is slated to run ~30 minutes, followed by a 30 minute live Q&A.

Today we announced the preview release of Azure Operational Insights as part of the Azure portal.  Operational Insights is a software as a service (SaaS) tailored for IT operations teams. This service leverages the power of Azure HDInsight to glean machine data across environments, and turn it into real-time operational intelligence to enable better-informed business decisions.

Operational Insights provides powerful search capabilities that enable ad-hoc root cause analysis and automated troubleshooting across multiple data sources. Without instrumenting any code directly or having knowledge of any complex schema, IT admins quickly receive interactive results. Operational Insights search allows customers to drill deeper into areas of interest that are highlighted by pre-packaged Intelligence Packs. Search also enables customers to form their own hypotheses and query data to find custom insights through proactive exploration or reactive troubleshooting. 

A powerful tool that Operational Insights provides is proactive operational data analysis through the delivery of Intelligence Packs. Intelligence Packs can be selected from an integrated gallery and offer pre-built rules and algorithms that perform the initial analysis for critical scenarios like capacity planning, configuration intelligence, and change tracking. Microsoft provides these Intelligence Packs based on learnings they have gathered from operating cloud-scale datacenters. Intelligence Packs allow customers to apply Microsoft-authored patterns onto their data in order to accelerate the time to first insight. 

Capacity planning: get deep visibility into your data center capacity, pinpoint capacity shortages, investigate “what-if” scenarios, identify stale and over-allocated virtual machines, and plan your future compute and storage needs for your infrastructure.

Update status: identify missing system updates across all of your servers whether they’re running in your data center or in a public cloud. Now you can know which of your servers have the latest updates, and which need them.

Change Tracking: When you troubleshoot an operational incident, the first thing you want to know is what has changed on your servers. Operational Insights helps to easily identify operational issues caused by software changes that occur in your environment.

Additional examples include configuration, security, and malware assessment.

Best of all, as an Azure-based service it provides an easy add-on to all Azure, Windows Server, and System Center customers. It has support for reading from an Azure Storage account for events and IIS logs for web roles without installing an agent, and the ability to install an agent on Azure VMs for in depth analysis from IPs.

The service is offered in three tiers: Free, Standard, and Premium. The free tier has a limit on the amount of data ingested daily and a 7-day data retention period. The Standard and Premium tiers do not have a limit on the amount of data ingested daily and have greater data retention periods. Learn more about this new release and how you can sign up today at the Operational Insights page. 

By Marco Limena, vice president of Hosting Service Providers, Microsoft Corp

Today, I am proud to share an exciting announcement about one of our longtime partners. Rackspace announced today that it now supports the Microsoft Cloud Platform, which includes Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center, Windows Server, and Azure Pack, in all of its U.S. data centers and that they are the latest addition to our Cloud OS Network.

Just last month, I wrote about the tremendous growth the Cloud OS Network has experienced since its launch late last year, with the number of partners increasing 4X during that time. In adding such a prominent managed cloud provider to the fold, today’s announcement is further evidence of the momentum behind the Cloud OS Network.

As demand for cloud solutions continues to grow at a blistering pace, it is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. That’s why we work closely with our hosting partners, like Rackspace, to deliver flexible solutions that combine Microsoft technologies with their expertise and services, allowing customers to choose their own roadmaps that best fit their business needs.

In his blog post about the announcement, Jeff DeVerter of Rackspace does a great job of articulating just how powerful such a partnership can be:

“I feel like the first 15 years of Rackspace was getting us ready for this moment. It’s in this moment that we take the individual data center and Microsoft competencies we have established and combine them into a singular cloud product and a service.” 

Rackspace is a longtime Microsoft partner, and I’m excited about the opportunities we’ll have to work more closely together in the coming years. 

Welcome back to the Windows Server 2003 EOS blog series.  This week we’re reviewing one of the targets that you may be in the midst of modernizing and migrating workloads to, Windows Server 2012 R2. 

One of the challenges we regularly hear is that folks are still getting up to speed with the plethora of new features we released in Windows Server 2012 which was followed by Windows Server 2012 R2 a year later. In Windows Server 2012 R2, we added a staggering amount of new capabilities and features based on your feedback. Considering how much has changed in the last couple of releases, it’s understandably hard to keep track of all the new capabilities. (And, we also recently released a Technical Preview for Windows Server v.Next too…) We bring this up because if you’re used to Windows Server 2003 or even Windows Server 2008, you are missing out on huge advancements we’ve made in software defined compute, software defined storage and software defined networking. Before we discuss a few of these benefits, let’s step back and take one last look at the venerable Windows Server 2003 and what the state of servers looked like back then.

Windows Server 2003: A snapshot of the hardware

Windows Server 2003 was released in April 2003, here’s are a few things to consider…

1. 32-bit processors were the standard (x86 servers); x64 processors were just coming to market.
2. Server processors were single core and started at 133 Megahertz. (Compare that with your phone and tablet…)
3. Power Management on servers was nearly non-existent.
4. .Net 1.0 was released (we’ve come a long way since then…)
5. Hard drives were measured in megabytes.
6. Solid State Disks (SSDs) didn’t exist.
7. Virtualization was a science project being used in test labs. There was no hardware support for virtualization.
8. Clouds were described as cumulus, stratus, cirrus and nimbus, not public, private and hybrid.

We’ve come a long way since then. J Keep this in mind as you look to modernize and migrate older applications. Let’s start by discussing an often overlooked server technology, power management.

Server Power Management

Power management is easy to overlook, but the benefits are very real. If you still have physical servers running Windows Server 2003, keep in mind that power management wasn’t enabled meaning that a server running at low utilization (or even idle) would still consume a substantial amount of power. Compare that with a modern server that employs a variety of power management techniques (processor power management, PCI, memory, etc.) this can lower your monthly power bill in a very tangible way. Couple this with the ability to use your hardware more efficiently by running multiple workloads virtualized in Hyper-V and the savings grow further.

.Net

Windows Server 2003 was the first release of .Net and we’ve continued to deliver consistent innovation since then. The full list of upgrades and enhancements to .Net are too numerous to cover here in their entirety, but here are just a few of highlights of new features to consider…

ASP.NET 4.5
ASP.NET 4.5 includes the following new features:

• Support for new HTML5 form types.
• Support for model binders in Web Forms. These let you bind data controls directly to data-access methods, and automatically convert user input to and from .NET Framework data types.
• Support for unobtrusive JavaScript in client-side validation scripts.
• Improved handling of client script through bundling and minification for improved page performance.
• Integrated encoding routines from the AntiXSS library (previously an external library) to protect from cross-site scripting attacks.
• Support for WebSockets protocol.

Parallel Computing
The .NET Framework 4 introduces a new programming model for writing multi-threaded and asynchronous code that greatly simplifies the work of application and library developers. The new model enables developers to write efficient, fine-grained, and scalable parallel code in a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. The new System.Threading.Tasks namespace and other related types support this new model.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Features in 4.5
In the .NET Framework 4.5, the following features have been added to make it simpler to write and maintain Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications:

• Simplification of generated configuration files.
• Support for contract-first development.
• Ability to configure ASP.NET compatibility mode more easily.
• Changes in default transport property values to reduce the likelihood that you will have to set them.
• Updates to the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas class to reduce the likelihood that you will have to manually configure quotas for XML dictionary readers.
• Validation of WCF configuration files by Visual Studio as part of the build process, so you can detect configuration errors before you run your application.
• New asynchronous streaming support.
• New HTTPS protocol mapping to make it easier to expose an endpoint over HTTPS with Internet Information Services (IIS).
• Ability to generate metadata in a single WSDL document by appending ?singleWSDL to the service URL.
• Websockets support to enable true bidirectional communication over ports 80 and 443 with performance characteristics similar to the TCP transport.
• Support for configuring services in code.
• XML Editor tooltips.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Features in 4.5
Several new features have been added to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in the .NET Framework 4.5. These new features include:

• State machine workflows, which were first introduced as part of the .NET Framework 4.0.1 (.NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1). This update included several new classes and activities that enabled developers to create state machine workflows. These classes and activities were updated for the .NET Framework 4.5 to include:
• The ability to set breakpoints on states.
• The ability to copy and paste transitions in the workflow designer.
• Designer support for shared trigger transition creation.

…and the list goes on and on. To see a more detailed list here are a few key links on MSDN:

What’s New in the .Net Framework Version 2.0

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t357fb32.aspx

Introducing the .Net Framework 3.0

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479861.aspx

What’s New in the .Net Framework 4.5, 4.5.1 and 4.5.2

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171868.aspx

An Overview of Performance Improvements in .Net 4.5

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh882452.aspx

In our next blog we’re going to be reviewing the hybrid opportunities available to you when you adopt Microsoft Azure.   Until then, we urge you to visit our Windows Server 2003 EOS website and the Migration Planning Assistant so that you may identify the tools and partners that are available to assist you and to continue moving forward with your migration projects.  There are only 246 days until July 14, 2015!

Today I will be giving a keynote address at the Open Compute Project (OCP) European Summit, where I’ll announce the contribution of the 2^nd-generation Open CloudServer (OCS v2) specification.  In January, Microsoft joined OCP and submitted the first OCS specification, born from our experience in our own cloud-scale datacenters.  OCS v2 incorporates a number of improvements, delivering greater performance and more flexibility.  In addition, Microsoft Open Technologies announced today the release of an open source reference implementation of operational management tools for OCS v2.  In all, we at Microsoft are very excited about the tremendous momentum we see in the Open Compute Project, and see it as an excellent community to foster more efficient datacenters and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing.

It’s been great to see tremendous support from industry partners contributing to the OCS v2 design.  At the summit, we will show an array of OCS v2 designs and platforms, including from the following partners: 

• Quanta QCT
• Wiwynn
• ZT Systems
• Hyve Solutions

In addition, a growing ecosystem of component vendors are expressing their support for OCS v2, including Intel, Mellanox, Seagate, Geist, Delta, and more.

Overall, the OCS v2 specification is the convergence of a number of design points.  Meeting these design points in one server is critical for Microsoft to meet its service delivery and datacenter operations goals, and also the needs of the community who’ll use OCS v2 for their own datacenter operations. 

The first design point for OCS v2 is to support a diverse range of cloud services.  The specifications we’re contributing to OCP reflect our long history in datacenter architecture and cloud computing.  To date, Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion in our global cloud infrastructure, and today we provide upwards of 200 cloud services to 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses in more than 90 markets around the world.  Over the last six months, the OCS v2 design has been thoroughly tested in our own datacenters, from powering IaaS and PaaS services in Windows Azure, to hosting e-mail and collaboration services in Office 365, to hosting latency-sensitive gaming services in Xbox Live.  Converging onto a unified, flexible design allows us to optimize the economics of our supply chain, while delivering a diverse array of cloud services from one underlying server platform.

Our second design point is ensuring OCS v2 can be deployed into any region or colocation facility around the world.  OCS v2 takes into account the variation of requirements across geographies, making it simple and efficient to deploy the design in a single region, or as part of a global footprint.  OCS v2 enables compliance with differing electrical standards that affect power and voltage to the rack, as well as safety and regulatory certifications that impact weight, rack size, mechanical, and cooling parameters. 

The last design point is to optimize performance relative to TCO.  OCS v2 delivers the high performance our online services need, while minimizing overall TCO.  Reaching the sweet spot for a number of server performance metrics was critical for OCS v2 to be deployed widely across Microsoft’s own global datacenter footprint.  OCS v2 introduces numerous new innovations, including: 

• A dual-processor design, built on Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, enabling 28 cores of compute power per blade, and reflecting Microsoft’s joint engineering collaboration with Intel to develop the next generation board.
• Advanced networking for low latency, high bandwidth, highly-virtualized environments, based on 40-gigabit Ethernet networking, with support for routable RDMA over Converged Ethernet (ROCEv2).
• Flexibility incorporated into the core design itself.  This allows the integration of a variety of components and add-on cards, including FPGA accelerators, which enables customers to tune their servers for their own unique workloads.
• Low-cost, high-bandwidth, Flash-based memory support, incorporating the latest form factor for m.2 Flash memory.  This allows OCS v2-based servers to incorporate higher-capacity SSDs, while ensuring TCO optimization by virtue of using cost-optimized NAND.
• A compact, high-capacity power supply, capable of delivering 1600 watts of power, with a high holdup time of 20 milliseconds.
• Support for high memory configurations, along with flexibility in the amount of memory deployed, by virtue of support for 128GB, 192GB, and 256GB memory capacity configurations.

Overall, we’re very excited about the industry enthusiasm for OCP, and how the organization is focusing the efforts of all the partners in our industry, to accelerate the rate at which innovations in our industry come to market.  We look forward to working with the community to help push datacenter innovation forward.  You can find more information about OCS v2 at www.opencompute.org.

 – Kushagra Vaid

Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System (CPS) embodies the core tenets of our modern cloud infrastructure offerings of high scalability, enterprise-grade and hybrid. Leveraging Microsoft’s vast experience in operating some of the world’s largest data centers and in software-based technologies and innovation, CPS has been optimized to deliver private cloud within your datacenter in days, not months, with the best price-to-performance, and one of the most compelling scaled cost economics in the industry.

In an independent research project conducted by Value Prism, sponsored by Microsoft, the research firm compared the total system cost of CPS with other existing Converged Infrastructure offerings in the market like VCE’s Vblock 340, HP’s CS700 with VMWare and IBM PureFlex System with VMWare. This included hardware, software licenses, deployment, maintenance and support over a period of five years.

From a price-to-performance perspective on a single ‘rack’ basis, CPS delivers the lowest five-year price-per-VM compared to the rest of the named competitive offerings. For a standard VM profile (of 2vCPU, 3.5GB RAM, 260 GB Disk), at $4,350 per VM, CPS is cheaper than the next closest competitor Vblock 340 (at $5,020 per VM) by between 15%-20%. For a data center running hundreds of VMs, this could potentially translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings for a deployment of CPS.

CPS also delivers comparable or superior performance in other secondary price-to-performance metrics such as price-per-core, price-per-memory and price-per-usable storage. Leading in workload performance metrics such as available memory-per-core and available storage-per-core compared to the other competitive offerings, CPS is much better resourced to deliver against intensive and mixed workloads.

As companies grow both in terms of workload demands and in scale, CPS is uniquely positioned to deliver even more attractive economic benefits. Due to the CPS architecture, CPS delivers increasing VM density as more racks are added to the stamp, thereby lowering the price-per-VM, while most competitive offerings remained little changed. This enables CPS customers to benefit from economies of scale as they grow their business. At a full-stamp configuration of four racks of CPS, the price-per-VM for CPS can potentially be as much as 45%-50% lower than that of an equivalent Vblock deployment.

Such breakthrough economics delivered by CPS has primarily been made possible by our relentless focus on driving cost efficiency and performance within our own Azure data centers, and making that technology and innovation available to CPS, our Azure-consistent cloud in the box offering. We are committed to extending CPS’ lead in price-to-performance and scale economics, as we continue to leverage best-practices and innovation from operating our cloud-scale data centers. Microsoft, with its broad and strong portfolio of offerings both for on-premises as well as for public and service provider clouds, enables CPS to truly deliver an unparalleled hybrid experience that best delivers the services that fit your needs and budget.

You can find out more about CPS product information and price-to-performance economics here.

Yesterday was an exciting day with the announcement of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS). It’s fantastic to finally take the wraps off of the result of a close engineering partnership between Microsoft and Dell to bring an Azure-consistent cloud in a box to our customers.

Building and operating a cloud is a complex undertaking. Integrating the hardware, installing and configuring the software, and optimizing the overall solution for performance, scale, and reliability means that many cloud deployments fall short of their goals. Many offerings in the market today deliver an integrated solution for virtualization or consolidation. Virtualization however is only one step towards cloud. To go further to deliver on the promise of a cloud, Microsoft and Dell teamed up to bring an integrated cloud solution called the Cloud Platform System (CPS) to market, lowering the risk and time required, and accelerating your journey to the cloud.

Microsoft’s knowledge from operating some of the world’s largest data centers influenced the architectural design of CPS.  Born from innovations and learnings from those cloud-scale data centers, the software-based technologies within CPS deliver optimized economics, reliability, performance and scale. 

CPS is a fully integrated, pre-configured converged system, based on Microsoft’s proven software stack of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, Windows Azure Pack, and Dell’s PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage and Dell Networking hardware. Leveraging architectural ideas from the Microsoft Azure public cloud, CPS delivers software defined functionalities like storage, networking and compute in a continuously available, resilient, as well as flexible and cost efficient solutions to our customers. CPS can go from delivery to live within days and lets you focus on the important tasks when it comes to delivering services to your users and customers.

Dell and Microsoft engineers have applied rigorous testing efforts to the CPS solution.  Each component is validated to ensure quality at an individual level; and each environment undergoes further integration testing in an intense simulated cloud environment to ensure that the hardware, firmware, drivers and software work together.  CPS arrives at your datacenter pre-built, pre-deployed, pre-configured and validated from top-to-bottom.  Just plug it in, connect to your network and your journey is complete in only days instead of weeks.

From cables to rails, from servers to software, CPS is ready to go.  CPS delivers a total Azure-consistent cloud solution to your data center, minimizing the complexity of capacity expansion.  By depending on a pre-built cloud solution from Microsoft and Dell, customers can turn their attention to serving the needs of the business. 

CPS is another important milestone in our vision of a cloud platform that includes the public, the private and the service provider cloud to deliver cloud services that fit your needs.

You can find out more about CPS here.

Today we are releasing the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) 3.0, a supported, freely available solution for converting VMware-based virtual machines and virtual disks to Hyper-V-based virtual machines and virtual hard disks (VHDs).

With the latest release, MVMC 3.0 adds the ability to convert a physical computer running Windows Server 2008 or above, or Windows Vista or above to a virtual machine running on a Hyper-V host (P2V).

This new functionality adds to existing features available including:

• Native Windows PowerShell capability that enables scripting and integration into IT automation workflows.
• Conversion and provisioning of Linux-based guest operating systems from VMware hosts to Hyper-V hosts.
• Conversion of offline virtual machines.
• Conversion of virtual machines from VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware vSphere 5.1, and VMware vSphere 4.1 hosts to Hyper-V virtual machines.

For more information about the MVMC 3.0 solution including how to download, make sure you visit here.

On October 21st, 2014, Microsoft will be hosting AzureConf 2014, a free event for the Azure community, as well as any developer or IT decision maker who simply wants to learn more about Azure and cloud computing.

If you haven’t heard by now, Microsoft Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications and services. Applications can be developed using a broad set of operating systems, frameworks and languages: Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, .NET to Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, and Hadoop.

This 1-day free conference will feature a key note speech by Scott Guthrie, as well as 7 live presentations + 11 recorded presentations available on demand after the conference for all attendees – meaning that there are at least 19 great reasons to join us.  Speakers this year include Michael Collier, Mike Martin, Rick Garibay, Richard Conway, and Chris Auld and they will present their own inventions and experiences on many aspects of Microsoft Azure; DocumentDB, Machine Learning, Big Data/HDInsight, Virtual Machines, and more!

Whether you’re still figuring out what Azure is and how it might address your business needs, or if you’re already all-in with Azure, the event will allow you to see how developers are using Azure to develop robust, scalable applications as well as the latest and greatest features. And it’s all free – all you have to do is sign up!

Visit the AzureConf webpage to check out the speakers and presentations we’ve got lined up for you. Register for free today and we’ll see you there.

We hope that you’ve been following along with this blog series so far, and that you’ve completed the Discovery phase of your migration planning.  Whether you are a Microsoft Partner or IT professional, you should now be at the point where you know the exact number of Windows Server 2003 instances running in your datacenter or in your customer’s environment, and you have a wonderful laundry list (or catalog) of applications and workloads that are going to need a new home come July 14, 2015.  If this description matches your current state, then you’re now ready to enter the assessment phase.  

The assessment phase is extremely crucial and requires you to analyze every workload and application - to identify the utilization, importance, and sustainability of each instance.  Through this process, you’ll probably find redundancies in your environment and service levels for availability that are mismatched.  Over time environments can be subject to "application sprawl" without the right level of IT controls, this is a great opportunity to address this and institute better controls.   Resources that were dedicated to what used to be a mainstream business critical project are no longer fully utilized but have resources dedicated to support a service level and level of availability that is no longer needed.  On the flip side, you’ll also identify truly vital and business critical applications and workloads that will need immediate attention and additional capacity.  You also may find cases where a business owner has "gone rogue" and established agreements with other vendors outside of the IT plan.  Assessment is the opportunity to target your efforts towards the migration and upgrade of the critical components of your datacenter, while making the most of scarce resources. 

In addition to technical evolution, an element of organizational change and business process evaluation is also important.  So this is an opportunity to meet with the business owner for each application to reconfirm the required service level, and to educate the business owner on the associated costs.  Most business stakeholders will always request 99.9% availability for their applications - but when educated on the actual costs a more productive conversation can occur, for example moving critical workloads to highly available cloud alternatives and agreeing to keep non-critical applications in lower cost/lower availability environments.  Some organizations also take this opportunity to institute internal chargeback models for IT infrastructure, or just "showback" where there is increased transparency on the actual infrastructure costs for each business owner or business unit.  As a Microsoft Partner advising a customer, or as an IT professional within and organization, this is a great opportunity to directly impact the bottom line by optimizing capital and operational expenditures.

This phase requires you to look closely at your catalog of applications and workloads.  There isn’t a tool or automation process that can assist you with this, as the effort requires detailed analysis of the relevance of individual workloads and applications to the business.  Depending on the number of items that you need to assess, this phase can take a substantial amount of time and will need inputs from the business in terms of what new capabilities they need, how much they need to expand, and where they plan to grow geographically..  You’ll need to identify the owners for each workload and application, and identify the impact of each.  In order to streamline the process, we suggest that you start to inventory and organize each workload and application by Type and criticality, as well as complexity and risk. 

• By Type:

Bucketing your workloads and applications in this manner will allow you to engage with the correct individuals to determine your migration approach.  For example, if you have numerous databases currently running on Windows Server 2003, then you will need to engage with the applications team to discuss an upgrade of that database to a supported version.

• By Criticality: 

What departments or customers use these resources today?  Do they fit the business goals of your organization?  Who uses this anymore? What availability do they need and how much downtime is acceptable? This categorization will reveal some potential opportunities, as well as potential issues as shown in the diagram below: 

• By Complexity and Risk: 

The complexity and risk categories will indicate which migrations might be the easiest and quickest to accomplish.  A critical consideration to keep top of mind is the dependencies that may exist, as there are chain reactions to retiring an application or database that is still connected to a separate workload.  A cross-category analysis provides even more insight.  For example, an important application with low complexity and only medium risk may be a good candidate for an early migration.  

After you’ve completed this phase, you should have successfully uncovered the truly important workloads and applications that require your undivided focus.  Likewise, the assessment will assist you with identifying the more easily migrated, as well as those that should be retired. 

Setting up a spreadsheet view on a share will assist you and your team with ensuring that a singular truth regarding owners, and the final categorization of each workload and application is clearly communicated. 

Setting up this spreadsheet early will also assist you with identifying the future ‘Target’ or ‘Destination’ for your workloads and applications.  (We’ll talk about those in our upcoming posts.) 

As we mentioned, you’ll need to coordinate between the various teams and business owners who are impacted.  As this will take time, having a well-thought out strategy prior to meeting is key to ensuring your migration doesn’t get stuck in a circular discussion that goes nowhere.  You’re leading this migration, so make sure you have your assessment as complete as possible, as well as a suggested approach for each application and workload.

Until next time, keep moving forward with your migration process, as of this post there are only nine months remaining to Windows Server 2003 EOS.  We’re here to help, so visit the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 migration page or reach out to one of our partners to assist you with this phase of your migration.  Until the next post!

When launched in January, Azure Site Recovery enabled customers to replicate and recover virtual machines between two of their own sites.  In June, we began a preview of a new capability to replicate to – and recover in – Azure.  Now, just a few months later, we’re concluding that preview and making the capability generally available.

IT is changing to take the cloud into account, and disaster recovery (DR) is a natural area to take advantage of cloud capabilities.  You can avoid the expense and complexity of building and managing your own secondary site for DR.  Replicate running virtual machines to Azure, instead, and recover there when needed.

A few months ago, Microsoft acquired InMage, and as we continue to integrate our DR technologies that software’s support for non-virtualized physical servers and heterogeneous hypervisors is also available as a deployment model of Azure Site Recovery.

Whichever configuration or deployment model you choose, Azure Site Recovery provides automated protection, continuous health monitoring, and orchestrated recovery for your applications.  Recovery plans can even be tested whenever you like without disrupting the services at your primary location.  If you haven’t yet tried Azure Site Recovery, it’s easy to sign up for Free one month trial of Azure to get started.

Visit the Site Recovery web page to learn more

Access Site Recovery planning and deployment guides

Following up on yesterday’s blog post, we’re happy to let you know that the Windows Server Technical Preview and System Center Technical Preview builds are now available.  Below are some direct links to help you navigate your way.

Windows Server Technical Preview

• TechNet Evaluation Center (US): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-vnext-technical-preview
• TechNet Evaluation Center (worldwide): http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dn781243
• MSDN subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/
• Microsoft Azure gallery image (needs Azure account):   http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

System Center Technical Preview

• TechNet Evaluation Center (US):  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-vnext-technical-preview
• TechNet Evaluation Center (worldwide):  http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dn781241
• MSDN subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/

As a reminder, these are early pre-release builds. Many of the features and scenarios are still in development. As such, these builds are not intended for production environments, labs, nor full evaluations.

We look forward to hearing about your evaluation experiences to inform our subsequent work in building out the next versions of Windows Server and System Center.

Thank you. 

Maybe you’ve heard some of the buzz surrounding TechEd Europe 2014. But is it right for you? If you’re an IT professional or an enterprise developer, joining us 28–31 October in Barcelona can have a profound impact on your career. Need some more convincing? Consider these five points.

Material Tailored to You

TechEd Europe is designed with tracks of sessions and lectures specific to your career. Whether you’re looking to boost your expertise on cloud and data center platforms, Office 365, or mobile devices, there’s something for you. Our Content Catalog and schedule builder can help you plan how best to spend your time at TechEd Europe even before you leave your desk.

Meet with Experts

Not only will you be learning material relevant to your field, but you’ll be learning from world-renowned experts. On top of that, you’ll be able to interact with them and get one-on-one face time to ask your burning questions. Being able to meet with industry professionals can be an invaluable experience, one you can’t find everywhere.

Connect with Your Peers

It’s not just speakers and vendors you’ll be talking to. TechEd Europe is also a time to connect with your peers from around the world. Meet up with old and new friends in interactive sessions to share ideas and collaborate on the latest tech issues. You may even meet future business contacts, partners, or customers.

Save on Your Exams

While you’re at TechEd Europe you can double your value by taking your Microsoft certification exams at a 50 percent discount. Not only will you return home with newfound knowledge in your field, but you’ll have credentials to help you move forward in your career. You can purchase the exams online and take them any time you want. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Barcelona, Barcelona, Barcelona!

During all of this you’ll be in the beautiful city of Barcelona, and at the end of the day you can check out Spain’s exciting nightlife. Take your new friends out for dinner or stroll through the city’s historic streets. TechEd Europe also offers happy hour events with sponsors and exhibitors, as well as the beachside Country Drinks event. There’s always something going on in this wonderful city!

These five points are just the beginning. Find out for yourself all of what TechEd Europe has to offer. Register today. 

At a Microsoft event earlier today, the Windows team shared new information on the direction of Windows in the enterprise. Likewise, we in the Cloud + Enterprise team would like to start sharing the direction for our datacenter products, anchored on Windows Server and System Center, as we continue to deliver against our Cloud OS vision. While this post will give you a sense of where we’re headed, we encourage you to stay tuned as we share more information in the coming weeks.

With Microsoft Azure, we are focused on delivering the world’s leading cloud platform for infrastructure and application services. In addition to Azure, Microsoft runs over 200 cloud-based services, many of which run at global scale including Office 365, Xbox Live, Bing, and Outlook.com. We take the know-how from building and operating these cloud services – automation and efficiency, flexibility, scalability – and bring it into Windows Server and System Center. We think this is unique in the industry: running global-scale cloud services AND providing customers the same innovative technologies to run their own cloud and IT services.

This is most true with Windows Server and System Center, the core of our cloud platform vision. We are excited today to start to share just a bit of what is to come with these releases. Some of the cloud innovation features you will see include:

Infrastructure upgrades: Rolling upgrades for Hyper-V clusters to the next version of Windows Server without downtime for your applications and workloads. This includes support for mixed versions as you transition your infrastructure.

Networking:  New components for our software-defined networking stack that enable greater flexibility and control, including a network controller role to manage virtual and physical networks.

Storage: New synchronous storage replication that enhances availability for key applications and workloads plus storage Quality of Service to deliver minimum and maximum IOPS in environments with workloads with diverse storage requirements.

Remote Desktop: Enhanced application compatibility with OpenGL and OpenCL support.

Identity and Access Management: New scenarios to reduce the risk profile of administrators with elevated rights, including time-based access with fine-grained privileges, and new application publishing capabilities.

As our first step in this journey, we will be making a “Technical Preview” available for the next version of Windows Server and System Center on October 1. We typically provide this release only to a small number of customers, but this time we are providing broad access for those that want to start the journey early. If you want to download the bits or try them on Azure, then by all means go for it. But do know that this is an early release, and many of the features and scenarios are still in development. As such this build is not intended for production environments, labs, nor full evaluations.

This early access is just one small step we are taking. We are also evolving how we ship our software and service our platform products to keep the software up-to-date. For our datacenter products, there is a duality in what customers want: in some scenarios customers tell us they favor stability and predictability while in other scenarios they want access to the latest and greatest technologies as fast as possible. We’ll have more specifics in the coming months, but you can expect us to deliver the best of both worlds: options for speed and agility, plus options for stability and durability.

This is just the start of the story with this wave of products. We will have much more to share in the coming weeks and months. Thank you and stay tuned for more!

Follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates at @MSCloud.

So we’re back with our 3rd blog post in our Windows Server 2003 EOS Migration Best Practices series.  Today we’re going to be reviewing useful tools and solutions that can help you execute the Discovery phase of your migration. 

Now, while the Discovery exercise is great opportunity to ensure that you thoroughly ‘reconnect’ with your datacenter, it can also turn into an overwhelming process.  Let’s face it, we’re all guilty of adding to datacenter clutter, spinning up a couple VMs here, installing some new applications there… you’re going to most likely find more than you bargained for <<big sigh>> you’re going to be fine, because you’re about to embark on your datacenter discovery!  

Good news for you, there are numerous tools to assist during the Discovery phase, so you can easily identify all ‘instances’ of Windows Server 2003.  In addition, you’ll be able to focus on identifying the applications, workloads, and databases that are going to need a new, secure, and compliant home come July 14, 2015. 

Time is ticking, and so if you haven’t already started this process today, let me remind you of the following: 

Important Reminder in Official Language:  Only Microsoft can offer support for Microsoft Products.  Continuing to run applications on Windows Server 2003 EOS post July 14, 2015 (under 300 days remaining!) will only result in spending more time and energy trying to support an OS that will not meet security and compliance requirements.   Continuing to run Windows Server 2003 in any capacity (Virtualized or Physical) after July 14, 2015 means that your applications are vulnerable because they are not receiving security updates and patches, your servers will likely fail compliance audits.

So now that you’re ready to kick-off the migration process with Discovery, let’s review some of the tools and services that you can use to get a clear line of sight as to what applications are impacted: 

Microsoft Planning Toolkit

Many of you might already know about the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, or MAP as it is referred to by many.  Here is why MAP will be useful for you:

• It’s a Free, Agentless, and Automated, Multi-Product Discovery tool that can assist with streamlining the Discovery process
• It’s easy to download and it produces a detailed readiness assessment report
• It generates executive proposals that include an extensive list of hardware and software information
• It provides you with actionable recommendations to help you organize your planning process

MAP  v9.1 will provide you with a complete list of the number of Windows Server 2003 instances, the number of applications running upon those instances, as well as the databases attached. 

Partner Tools

There are several good partner solutions available with a free trial or for purchase.  For example, Dell offers Dell Asset Manager Discovery Edition that effectively identifies and categorizes more than 85% of all software without manual intervention.  Do you also think that you have Active Directory running on Windows Server 2003?  Dell ChangeAuditor takes Discovery a bit further and assists you with identifying systems that require connectivity to Active Directory during and after migration.  

Consulting Services

If you’re feeling as though you’d like some assistance with the Discovery phase, then you’ll be pleased to know that there are numerous professional services options.  Microsoft Consulting Services currently offers a Discovery and Rationalization Workshop designed to assist with completing a thorough Discovery and rationalization of the applications that must be moved. 

Microsoft’s Global Partner Ecosystem

Microsoft’s global partner ecosystem has special offerings for businesses of all sizes – including workshops, tools, and professional services to assist with all phases of migration, spanning infrastructure for hybrid cloud alternatives all the way to custom application development and managed services. 

Regardless of the path you take to complete your discovery, it is critical that you remember the goal is to not just locate and identify the Windows Server 2003 instances, but the applications that are running on them.  You will itemize the number of applications, databases, workloads, as well as the OS that supports them.  A thoughtful approach to executing this phase with due diligence helps you to enter the next phase of Migration Planning – Assessment – with a complete understanding of the effort required. 

Microsoft and our partners are ready to support you during this Discovery phase.  Take a look at the locally available tools and solutions available to you today by visiting the Microsoft Migration Planning Assistant.   Or visit the Microsoft Pinpoint site to find certified partners with the right competencies and services to help assess your options for a successful Windows Server 2003 migration. 

Last week, Microsoft captured top honors at Intel’s annual Developer Forum taking place in San Francisco. Intel awarded "Best of Show" to Microsoft in the combined solutions group category for Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials. This award is given to partners who deliver an exceptional implementation of Intel technology and is determined by votes submitted by both journalists and industry analysts.

The award-winning Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials is built on the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system to provide a powerful, reliable, simple to manage, and cost-effective platform for network-attached storage appliances.  It delivers to small businesses cloud integration and the latest storage innovations from Microsoft.    

Windows Storage Server Essentials 2012 R2 is offered as an embedded offering only to our partners, like Thecus, who preinstall it on their hardware and customize it to formulate their unique solutions.  

We’re back with our 2^nd blog post in the Windows Server 2003 End-of-Support (EOS) Best Practices series.  In today’s post we want to review the first activity that can help ensure a successful migration project – Discovery.  This activity allows you the opportunity to identify exactly what, and how many of your business critical applications are still running on Windows Server 2003.   To assist with streamlining your planning process, we’ve created this short video outlining the four step process to migration planning.

We recommend that each and every person on point for migration off of Windows Server 2003 takes part in an in-depth discovery to ensure that every application and workload currently reliant on Windows Server 2003 is identified.  We also recommend that even those of you who have already begun your journey to migrate off of Windows Server 2003, take a short moment to ask:

“Have we completed an in-depth discovery?” 

“Have we truly identified all Windows Server 2003 instances?”

“Do we have a list of each and every application, workload, and server role?” 

If you don’t have a strong (and confident) answer to these types of questions, then we suggest you do a more thorough investigation of your datacenter and application landscape.  You may be very surprised at what you find. 

Thorough discovery will assist you with clearly identifying ‘all’ locations that Windows Server 2003 can be running, and provide you with a crisper plan while ensuring compliance and security requirements are met.   For example, you may currently be running applications outside of your existing on-premises datacenter, or virtualized environments.  These types of environments are also at risk for creating compliance and security issues post July 14, 2015.  

Many companies and individuals who have completed a Discovery are surprised by the number of instances that are running, and the dependencies between workloads, applications, and the servers themselves. A well-executed discovery effort will ensure accurate project scope and efficient allocation of time and resources.  While identifying the true number of instances is a straight forward exercise, the benefits of completing this exercise as soon as possible, will provide you with a better opportunity to tackle the intricacies associated with migrating the applications themselves.  You’ll then be able to move forward with your Assessment and Rationalization of each application, database and dependencies.  The types of software and workloads that you’ll be discovering will fall into the following groups: 

1. Windows Server Roles
2.  Microsoft Applications
3. Custom Applications
4. Third-Party Applications

In addition to Windows Server 2003, you’ll also want to consider other technologies from the same era that your applications currently rely on.  I’m talking about your databases.  Applications that you’re running today on Windows Server 2003 will often have a dependency on data, and the associated database is most likely SQL Server 2005, which also reaches EOS 10 months (April 12, 2016) after Windows Server 2003.  As a result, your migration planning and Discovery has just expanded from discovering not only the number of Windows Server 2003 instances, but the number of SQL Server 2005 databases attached to each application currently supported by Windows Server 2003. 

Another thing to keep top of mind is that migration is not just confined to the Infrastructure IT function – but the developer function as well.  Most organizations find that they still maintain numerous custom applications, often developed in house, that have been running for the past 10 years. Making sure that your development teams are aware of your migration activities during the Discovery phase, will ensure they have an understanding around the impact of Windows Server 2003 migration and their role in supporting the migration of the identified applications to a supported operating system.   Reaching out to the development teams as soon as possible will assist with meeting timelines, but will also prompt the opportunity to take a hard look at these applications, in light of how much user requirements have changed over the last decade. 

Don’t take your foot off of the accelerator!  Each migration project will be unique, and the best way to ensure confidence and a strong plan is to conduct a true “Discovery” effort that includes every area of the business.  Your Microsoft representative, as well as Microsoft Consulting Services and Partners are here to assist.  Discovery and Immersion Workshops are available today, so that you can clearly identify your opportunities for modernization, and realize the benefits available with the latest generation of server innovation. 

Until our next post, we encourage you to reach out to your Microsoft Representative and Microsoft partners and to visit the Windows Server 2003 end-of-support website where you will find a number of additional resources to help your planning and decision-making. 

“Windows Server 2003 End-of-Support is right around the corner In preparing for this moment, CIOs, IT Managers, Infrastructure Engineers, Application Managers, and Developers (Yes, I said Developers – it’s not a typo) who are currently running this loved OS should pause to look carefully at their options.  This is one of the largest IT opportunities of this decade, and the next opportunity to innovate not only in the datacenter, but also in the delivery and production of applications that drive today’s businesses.

The opportunities to advance are not marked by mere lift-and-shift actions, but the consideration of how each and every application, workload, embedded system, is or is not meeting the demands of today.  This is a leaps and bounds moment that will require effort on all fronts of IT, and once embraced, will benefit IT, the business, employees, and customers in ways that were not previously possible.  This is your moment to innovate within infrastructure and applications.”

Ok, so that was the pitch – but honestly speaking, inspirational words aside… it is flat out true.  Over ten years have passed since the release of Windows Server 2003, and it’s flattering that a large number of businesses continue to run critical applications and workloads on this same OS.  With that being said, the end of support (EOS) for the tried and true Windows Server 2003 family of products will occur July 14, 2015.  After this date, all patches and security updates will cease and any businesses continuing to run Windows Server 2003, will face compliance issues with increased vulnerabilities.  Which means that all of those workloads, data sets, applications (yes, even those that your employees complain about using on a daily basis), they are also facing this EOS.

In this blog series, we’re going to be sharing details on how you can ensure success in your migration efforts, and the continued protection of your company’s data; as well as ways to improve the overall health of your IT department while providing better services, applications, reliability and agility.   

The Windows Server team understands that the time to complete a migration and the complexity of each is unique to each business.  The planning process itself can be a daunting one.  Because of this, we want to ensure that you are aware of all of the tools that can assist with your migration, and point out opportunities for upgrade and taking advantage of the newest technologies.  Whether you’re looking to move Microsoft Workloads, Microsoft Applications, Custom Application as well as Third-Party Applications, this blog series will provide you with a framework to plan and execute your own individual migration project.

We’ll be following the four steps of migration planning for this series:

Until our next post, we encourage you to visit the Windows Server 2003 end-of-support website. Here you will find a number of additional resources to help your planning and decision-making. Microsoft and Partners are here to assist you, because today is your day one of embracing the fact that Windows Server 2003 End of Support is one of the largest IT moments of this decade.  You are the one in the driver’s seat, and you are the one steering your business forward. 

Look for our next blog post on September 9, 2014. In this post, we’ll discuss why discovery is important. 

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve shared with you our vision for the software defined datacenter and talked about how our approach to hybrid cloud can help you transform your business into a more flexible enterprise of the future. It is our belief that our Cloud OS vision, built on the foundation of Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Azure is industry leading and can bring significant value to your business today. Microsoft provides a unique set of capabilities to help you provision and manage your infrastructure now, whether it is on-premises, in a Microsoft datacenter, or delivered by a hosting service provider. This combination makes it easier for you to leverage the strengths of your on-premises investments AND the flexibility of the cloud.

Microsoft is currently positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, x86 Server Virtualization, Enterprise Application Platform as a Service and Public Cloud Storage Services,* and we believe this validates Microsoft’s strategy to enable the power of choice as we deliver industry-leading infrastructure services, platform services and hybrid solutions. Only Microsoft has achieved recognition as a Leader across all four capability areas.

• Cloud Infrastructure as a Service: We feel the pace of innovation in our cloud solutions led to much greater customer adoption in the past year, contributing to a very strong showing in the Cloud IaaS space.
• x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure: Recognized as a leader for the fourth year in a row, Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V continues to deliver an enterprise-class datacenter that customers can depend on.
• Enterprise Application Platform as a Service: Azure has added over 200 new services since last year, delivering a more complete portfolio and enabling customers to focus on creating the next generation of amazing apps without having to worry about managing the full stack.
• Public Cloud Storage Services: One of two vendors listed as a leader in this area. We believe the integration of our server, management and cloud offerings was key to success.

As you can see, Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision provides you with options and flexibility to grow your infrastructure as your business matures. Therefore, if you need to react quickly to a disruptive competitor, or adjust to new regulations two years down the line, your infrastructure can enable you to adjust vs. being an obstacle to change. Our approach is resonating with our customers as well, and we invite you to check out some of their stories:

• Aston Martin chose Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Microsoft Azure to help increase efficiency, reliability, and to take advantage of hybrid scenarios.
• United Airlines reduced operating costs and improved customer retention by adopting a Microsoft Private Cloud solution.
• Telefónica has chosen to implement a public-private hybrid solution to meet its unique needs.

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Lydia Leong, May 28, 2014; Gartner, Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, Thomas J. Bittman, July 2, 2014; Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Yefim V. Natis, January 7, 2014; Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services, Gene Ruth, July 9, 2014

**Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.**

Customers can now download the latest update rollups for System Center 2012 R2.  Update rollups provide a cumulative package of fixes for each System Center component and are available from Microsoft Update.  Alternatively, they can be manually downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

You can view the updates for each component at the Description of Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2 page, including the list of all the fixes as well as download links.  Also available at this time is the Windows Azure Pack Update Rollup 3 as well as System Center 2012 SP1 Update Rollup 7. 

As a part of this release we have two exciting new updates to System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager.  These include a new Office 365 Management Pack and two new VMM resource visualization dashboards.

Office 365 management pack

Through Operations Manager, datacenter admins can monitor the health of their Office 365 subscriptions and provide alerts when subscribed services may be experiencing an outage.  The MP enables in-depth monitoring for its individual services, showing you the number of active incidents for each individual services, such as Lync Online, Exchange Online and Identity Services.  Service Status displays a tree of Office 365 services and features for the selected subscription and corresponding active incidents count and an integrated Message Center showcasing important service information.  Download the Office 365 management pack here.

VMM resource visualization

As part of the update release, we are also providing two new dashboards focused on visualizing resource consumption of virtualization hosts and VMs. The VMM host dashboard shows the list of discovered Hyper-V hosts from VMM, with their overall states, properties, and all related performance counters.

Partnered with the Virtual machine dashboard, showing the list of discovered virtual machines with their overall states (Red, Yellow and Green) and utilization. This widget can be used to switch the size of the VM states.

Download the VMM resource visualization pack and further information here.

Make sure you check both of these new exciting options to System Center Operations Manager, and feel free to post any questions to the System Center Operations Manager forum.

The central point when we talk about learning from cloud is that this new computing model can help you rethink your approach to infrastructure in fundamental ways.  But with such a breadth of opportunity, it can be tough to figure out where to start. Here are three options for delivering a more agile infrastructure:

1. Rethink your traditional approach to the datacenter
2. Get past objections to the cloud
3. Identify where the cloud will bring you the most benefit

It sounds like a lot.  But each step has a few key actions you can take that will allow you to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and give yourself some additional time and money to use in making your infrastructure a competitive advantage.

1. Rethink your traditional approach to the datacenter.
   
   We’ve talked in this blog series about software-defined networking and also about new options for storage.  Reducing manual processes for network management can make a big difference in how easy it is to run your infrastructure.  And the opportunity for cost reduction with storage is significant.  But the overall goal when you look at your existing on-premises infrastructure should be to consider where existing processes are slowing you down.  Does it take too long to fulfill requests for new capacity?  Is it tough to move workloads?  Are storage costs taking over your budget?  The point is to identify the one or two areas where you really want to effect change, and then explore how software-defined approaches might get you there.
   
   
2. Get past objections to the cloud.
   
   Your organization probably has a list of reasons why cloud computing isn’t part of your infrastructure strategy.  Compliance requirements and regulatory hurdles can create genuine barriers to cloud adoption.  But there’s a more subtle set of objections that you can and should be prepared to address.  For one thing, there’s a good chance that your organization is already using many SaaS applications, whether sanctioned by IT or not.  From a security perspective the Azure Trust Center is a great resource for handling any security or compliance questions.  And for more general concerns, it can be helpful to start small, identifying one or two applications that would benefit the most from cloud scale.  Cloud storage is also a great place to start, because you can begin by just moving infrequently accessed archival data – which frees up space on-premises.
   
   
3. Identify where the cloud will bring you the most benefit.
   
   The reason there aren’t more guides out there on shifting your infrastructure to the cloud is that there isn’t one right answer.  If you know in advance that you need significant scale, then a cloud deployment makes a lot of sense.  Perhaps more importantly, if you don’t know in advance how much scale is going to be required, then cloud deployment makes even more sense. We have customers with applications that support new business offerings, and the level of demand for the offering just can’t be predicted. Instead of investing in a lot of infrastructure up front, they take advantage of cloud scale on-demand.  Cloud is also great for applications with highly predictable spikes in demand that would otherwise put a lot of pressure on your existing infrastructure.  And finally, we’ve seen many customers benefit from the ability to deploy applications at global scale, in regions where they don’t currently have their own datacenters.

The emergence of cloud computing has created a transitional moment for IT.  By looking at ways to standardize, streamline, automate, and simplify across all of your usual processes, you can benefit in a large-scale way.

Evaluate Windows Server 2012 R2

Try Microsoft Azure

You talked, we listened… The world of IT and your needs are rapidly changing. In a cloud first, mobile first you need:

• A broader range of learning opportunities across the breadth of Microsoft’s technologies and solutions as well as deeper insights and technical content
• More access to senior technology leaders and engineers doing coding every day to get your questions answered
• Greater understanding of future technology vision and roadmap to help you be successful
• Greater community interaction with technology professionals and your industry peers in structured and informal settings
• Epic after hour gatherings where you can unwind and turn on the fun with your peers

We’re excited to announce the inaugural unified Microsoft technology event for enterprises the week of May 4, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois.

If you’ve attended TechEd, SharePoint Conference, Microsoft Exchange Conference, Lync Conference, Project Conference or Microsoft Management Summit, this the place for you to be. It’s everything you’ve come to know and love and more. You’ll find what you’re familiar with and you’ll learn more about Office 365, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Azure, Windows Server, Microsoft System Center, Windows Intune, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Windows and lots more. This change only affects events scheduled in calendar year 2015. This year, TechEd Barcelona will proceed as planned.

Save the week of May 4, 2015 and follow us on twitter @MSCloud and @TechEd_NA to stay connected – we’ll be back in September with more details. See you in Chicago for this unparalleled event.

Earlier in July, we looked at how storage options are changing.  This week we asked Dell to talk more about their support for Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2 and what they’re hearing from customers about this new approach to growing storage requirements. 

How would you explain Storage Spaces to a customer?

Storage Spaces is Microsoft’s entry into the rapidly growing storage technology area called Software Defined Storage.  SDS essentially removes expensive proprietary technology from a storage array and creates a scalable, cost-effective shared storage solution using standards-based, commodity components.  Storage Spaces, one of the leading SDS technologies, is particularly appealing to businesses like hosters and cloud providers looking for deep and cost-effective storage arrays.

Why is Dell committed to supporting Storage Spaces?

Support for Storage Spaces allows us to offer our customers the broadest variety of options from our comprehensive storage portfolio; whether it be a traditional hardware-based, or a software defined storage solution.  We find that many customers utilize both types of technologies, depending on their specific workload, performance, and availability requirements.

What are some of the customer advantages that Dell sees with Storage Spaces?

Acquiring and managing highly available and reliable storage can take a significant part of an IT budget.  Storage Spaces provides an excellent option for customers to gain advanced storage capabilities at a lower price point.  Customers love the fact that they don’t have to pay additional licensing fees for Storage Spaces, and can use commodity compute and JBODs. They also find that it’s not difficult to quickly scale a Storage Spaces storage array, and the performance can be easily ramped up with the addition of SSD hard drives, for example.  Finally, customers really value the idea that they aren’t locked into proprietary hardware configurations. 

How are Dell customers reacting?

Many customers have heard of Storage Spaces and ask us to advise them whether this is an appropriate storage solution for their IT environment.  They typically describe business issues, such as their proprietary stack isn’t cost effective and/or they need a better win rate against their competitors.  We’re happy to work with them to design a solution that is laser focused on their unique performance, reliability, capacity, and SLA requirements.  We’ve found that in nearly all cases, a proof-of-concept Storage Spaces configuration ultimately converts into a production implementation.

To learn more about Dell’s offerings: Dell expands support for Storage Spaces in Windows Server with PowerVault MD3060e