Advancing Interoperability in the Cloud

Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager, Open Solutions Group

I’m excited to be at the Open Source Business Conference today and to announce that in collaboration with SUSE, and based on our longstanding alliance, we are releasing a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center. This management pack connects the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft’s management platform. As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console. If you’d like to test out the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center, you can access it here.

Last year, at OSBC I talked about how the growth of cloud computing means vendors and communities need to come together to solve interoperability issues in the cloud for the benefit of our customers. Towards that effort, we announced our plans to enhance interoperability with community Linux by providing support for Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V to run CentOS. 

As enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud computing grows, the importance of coming together to solve interoperability issues is only growing. Microsoft is working with the ecosystem of vendors and communities to deliver cloud solutions to customers based on their specific needs and scenarios. My group, the Open Solutions Group, specifically works with open source software vendors and OSS communities to provide a heterogeneous cloud platform for customers.

The management pack we are announcing with SUSE is a good example of the work that Microsoft is doing to advance interoperability for private clouds. On the public cloud front, there’s extensive work going on across the company to facilitate interoperability between Microsoft and open source cloud tools and services. One of the most exciting examples of this comes from the SQL Server Team -- the Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure (for which Microsoft released a second preview last month). This solution for managing “big data,” connecting it and turning it into business insight is a prime example of the type of value customers want to realize as a result of leveraging open source and Microsoft software together.

As I noted in my OSBC session today, heterogeneous environments are the norm for our customers and the move to cloud computing only increases the need for interoperable solutions. OSG is one group among many at Microsoft delivering mixed source solutions to help address the needs created by the transition to cloud computing. If you have thoughts, as a partner or customer, about solutions we should be delivering, let us know. We are interested in hearing from you.