Microsoft Hawks Azure Cloud ‘Appliance’

Microsoft has already made waves with its Windows Azure cloud services offering, which aims to entice enterprises and service providers to build and deploy their apps using Microsoft’s cloud data centers.

Now, the company is poised to offer the same technology to partners, so that they and their customers can build their own in-house Azure clouds hosted on their own hardware. Of course, doing so also requires that they be able to support the kind of scale that Microsoft says Azure best supports: Think servers numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Datamation takes a look.

Microsoft plans to offer a version of its Windows Azure services platform in an “appliance” configuration that can be deployed by customers as well as by third-party hosting partners.

“The appliance is the same Windows Azure platform we run at Microsoft, and includes Windows Azure and SQL Azure on Microsoft-specified hardware,” Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Server and Tools Division, said in a blog post Monday morning.

Read the full story at Datamation:


Microsoft to Offer Azure ‘Appliance’