Microsoft To Put System Centre 2012 Into Private Cloud

Microsoft demonstrated its push into the private cloud space with new capabilities in its System Centre 2012 technology at the company’s Microsoft Management Summit 2011.

At the summit earlier today, Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Anderson demonstrated how private clouds built with Microsoft technologies can help IT organisations meet their companies’ demands for more agile services.

Anderson introduced the new System Centre 2012, which will enable IT managers to deliver private cloud services that empower business teams, provide greater insights into application performance, and allow IT to carry forward current investments as they adopt public cloud computing.

Adding virtual app intelligence

“Our IT customers have told us that their focus is helping their businesses deliver the critical applications that will strengthen their bottom line, while maintaining necessary control and compliance,” Anderson said, in a statement. “Virtualisation and server consolidation are important steps toward cloud computing, but it’s essential to have management tools that provide intelligence about how the apps themselves are doing, not just management of virtual machine black boxes. Microsoft’s management solutions provide that insight, along with the needed oversight.”

Microsoft’s management solutions are aimed at IT staff that are under constant pressure to deliver and to be faster, more agile and to do it for less cost, Amy Barzdukas, general manager of Microsoft’s server and tools business, told eWEEK.

System Centre 2012, slated for release later this year, is designed to enable IT managers to build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today — including other vendors’ platforms and virtualisation technologies.

In his keynote, Anderson demonstrated the Virtual Machine Manager capability in System Centre 2012, available today as a beta release. Using this core component of Microsoft private cloud solutions, he said IT managers can efficiently standardise infrastructure and application services and delegate them to business partners for fast deployment of applications.

“One of the key issues we wanted to address with System Centre 2012 was to get VM sprawl under control and to ease the migration to private cloud and ultimately to public cloud,” Barzdukas added.

To that end, at MMS Anderson also showed code name “Concero,” the new System Centre 2012 capability that empowers department level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure while helping IT managers deliver greater flexibility and agility to their business teams.

Managing private cloud services

In a blog post today, Anderson also said: “Finally, with a Microsoft private cloud, customers can use the infrastructure they know and own today to build and deliver private cloud computing as a managed service, including other vendors’ tools, platforms and virtualisation technologies. We emphasise putting our customers’ needs ahead of any particular technology.”

“The move to cloud computing significantly raises the bar for what is expected in enterprise management solutions,” stated Chris Wolf, research vice president at Gartner. “It’s easy for a vendor to create a tool that automates the creation of a virtual machine and call it ‘cloud management.’ However, the real value of IT management comes from keeping a service up and running, which means tools that automate configuration and operations must take advantage of application knowledge to ensure an optimal lifecycle. Organisations should take this management paradigm shift as an opportunity to reassess current processes and move forward with a platform capable of meeting the complex demands of tomorrow’s cloud-enabled IT services.”

System Centre 2012 solutions will enhance the current Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud programmes and offerings for private cloud computing, including the ability to best manage virtualised workloads. Anderson highlighted new findings from the Enterprise Strategy Group on the enterprise readiness and performance of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V for best-in-class virtualisation of Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. More information about these findings is available on Microsoft’s website.