July 28th, 2011 News Thursday: “Daytona” Announcement, Hyper-V Updates, and more Server and Tools News…

by STB Blogger

“Daytona” now available for download, brings cloud to scientists’ fingertips

On July 18, at the 12th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research announced details of a new platform for Windows Azure, code-named “Daytona.” “Daytona” supports a wide class of data analytics and machine learning algorithms. This toolkit, available free to scientists and researchers, is Microsoft Research’s answer to the scientific community’s plea for a computational runtime for data analysis and machine learning over their big data sets. The project was developed as part of the eXtreme Computing Group’s Cloud Research Engagement Initiative, and has been released as a research technology preview. XCG will continue to enhance functionality of “Daytona” based on the scientific and research communities’ input. Scientists and researchers can download  “Daytona” under a Microsoft Research License Agreement.

For more information and to download “Daytona” please visit: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/azure/daytona.aspx

Microsoft extends Hyper-V interoperability

Yesterday at the 2011 OSCON Conference Gianugo Rabellino, senior director of Open Source Communities at Microsoft, announced Hyper-V support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and CentOS 6.0 guest operating systems. (Hyper-V already supported previous versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11.) This news reflects our continued effort to provide fully cross-platform private cloud and virtualization solutions, including support for a range of application frameworks, third party management tools, operating systems and hypervisors.  Customers can download the new Linux Integrations Services for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 from https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26837 .

This news follows Monday’s Microsoft and SUSE  joint announcement of a four-year extension to an existing agreement for broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support.  As part of this alliance, Microsoft and SUSE will continue their technical collaboration on solutions to help customers more effectively in the areas of cloud, virtualization and manageability. 

From that press release:  “The Microsoft-SUSE expanded support program has helped a number of our customers standardize on SUSE as an optimized guest on Hyper-V, as well as provide a highly cost-effective support program for non-SUSE distributions, including Red Hat,” said James Largotta, global vice president of sales for BridgeWays, an independent software vendor that develops management packs to extend the cross-platform capabilities of Microsoft System Center.