Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution for Enterprise IT Overview Video

If you’re been reading the papers, most of them will tell you that in the next few years, hybrid cloud is going to be the prevalent architecture for enterprise IT. Is that the case now? Probably not. Not many people have a real private cloud, one that supports the five essential characteristics cloud computing. You might not even be on track for a private cloud right now, but are realizing the benefits of a highly virtualized infrastructure using Hyper-V and System Center VMM. Regardless of whether you have a private cloud or a virtualized datacenter, what you’ll probably want to do is integrate your current IT environment with a public cloud infrastructure service provider, such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure, to get the benefits of hybrid cloud, or if you don't have a private cloud, hybrid IT.

As a member of an enterprise IT organization, your first question is probably going to be “where do I start”? Well, you could start by getting to know about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services and what it can do for you. Then you can then kick the tires on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services by creating an Azure Virtual Network, creating a virtual machine and placing it on the Azure Virtual Network. Then you could create some more virtual machines and load balance them. Heck, you can create several virtual machines and configure them to auto-scale, so that you have true elasticity – just like what I talked about in my cloud architecture talks at TechEd 

Yet, after your initial investigation of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services and playing around with some of it’s features, what’s next? What approach should you use to plan, design, and implement the core infrastructure that you can use to support hybrid services that have components that run both on Windows Azure and on-premises? How are you going to address the key availability, scalability, performance, manageability  and security questions that need to be answered before you even consider moving production applications to a hybrid environment?

That’s where the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution for Enterprise IT comes in. This “solution” is given to you in a document set that includes the following:

• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution Overview
• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution Scenario
• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution Design
• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution Implementation
• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution Design Considerations

I could go into all the details on what each of these guides are about – but you’ve read enough already. If you think the solution might be useful to you and want to know more before diving in, then watch this 8 minute video where Jim Dial informs you on what the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Solution for Enterprise IT has to offer.

HTH,

Tom

Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, SCD iX Solutions Group
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