System Center 2012 RC now available to help build your Private Cloud

Two days ago, Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business division leaders participated in a webcast, “Transforming IT with Microsoft Private Cloud” where they announced the release candidate of System Center 2012 and simplified Microsoft’s private cloud management products.  

You can download these tools here.

There are many applications running in datacenters today that are candidates for a private cloud approach, at least in the short term.  In the long run, public cloud computing is where the world is ultimately headed, however I expect many large companies and governments will take a ‘hybrid’ approach over the next decade to vet the cloud computing paradigm to ensure it meets their particular computing requirements.  The announcements from two days ago set companies on the path to build their own private clouds and/or leverage private clouds provided by some of Microsoft’s key partners.

For those of you still eyeing cloud computing in general, it’s important I believe to point out that only Microsoft is both building a global scale public cloud platform and enabling private clouds to blossom (with Windows Sever and System Center) and only Microsoft offers customers the flexibility to choose how/where they want to run their cloud applications.  Microsoft’s private cloud solutions benefit from the feedback loop of delivering our cloud services at massive scale and applying those learnings to our on-premises products.  Brad Anderson published a blog post that describes how public and private clouds come together that I encourage you to view as well.

“The Journey to the cloud”   is becoming an already overused term these days to describe the approach that each organization is undertaking to determine how to best take advantage of the many advances in technology as well as cost avoidance that cloud computing offers.  For IT pros, and the developers that work with them, managing applications and environments is key to transforming IT infrastructure into services the business can use to quickly and reliably deliver applications from the cloud.  With a deep understanding of customers’ applications acquired through years of delivering industry leading IT products, Microsoft’s System Center can manage applications running on physical servers, virtualized servers, private clouds or in the public cloud.

I encourage you watch the “Transforming IT with Microsoft Private Cloud”webcast and learn more.

Enjoy!