October 11, 2012 News Thursday: Windows Azure “Fast” campaign, and more Server and Tools news!

by STB Blogger

Windows Azure Challenges Developers to Show Us They’re “Fast”
On Monday, the Windows Azure team unveiled its “Fast” campaign, challenging developers to showcase how fast they are with Windows Azure. Visitors to the campaign site will hear from developers and Microsoft engineers first-hand via short videos that focus on speeding up app development and making apps go fast using Windows Azure. The videos uploaded by developers will serve as their entry for a chance to win a trip to Las Vegas, which includes track time with some of the world’s fastest cars.

For more information, and to hear the world’s fastest rapper, NoClue, for his take on Windows Azure, check out: www.meetwindowsazure.com/fast.

New User Experience for Windows Azure Service Bus Introduced
Earlier this week, Windows Azure announced that Service Bus is now part of the Windows Azure portal. The announcement comes with new features, which include usage visualization of Service Bus queues topics and subscriptions, entity status updates and dashboards for monitoring queues and topics. Additional features for better management, monitoring and diagnostics of Service Bus entities will be added in the future.

For the all the details, read the Windows Azure blog post.

Survey Results Show Microsoft Hyper-V is Quickly Gaining Ground on VMware
On the heels of the Windows Server 2012 launch, customer adoption of Microsoft virtualization and private cloud solutions is growing. A recent survey from Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, revealed that “VMware’s ‘free ride’ is rapidly coming to an end.” The survey, conducted at VMworld U.S. in August by Zeus and virtualization management vendor Xangati, found:

  • 19.6% of respondents are currently implementing Hyper-V, while another 20.9% are currently evaluating Windows Server 2012 for potential future deployment.
  • 52% of respondents believe Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 and vSphere technologies are equivalent.
  • 34.7% of respondents cited VMware’s licensing and pricing as the reason for moving to a hybrid VMware/Microsoft hypervisor model.

On a similar note, InformationWeek posted an in-depth research report, detailing their survey, which found that 77% of respondents are using Microsoft Hyper-V or are open to adopting the hypervisor.

Edwin Yuen, Director of Windows Server and Management Strategy also posted about these surveys on the Server and Cloud Platform blog.

Cloud Security Readiness Tool Announced at RSA Europe
At RSA Europe this week, the Trustworthy Computing (TwC) Group announced the release of its bi-annual Security Intelligence Report (SIRv13), along with a new free Cloud Security Readiness Tool. Organizations can use this tool to understand their systems, processes, policies and practices and improve their current IT state, learn relevant industry regulations, and receive guidance on evaluating cloud adoption.

To learn more about the full announcement, please visit the Trustworthy Computing blog.