Creating and Offering a Private Cloud

Why are a growing number of businesses talking about creating private clouds in their datacenters? Many businesses have already introduced server virtualization to reap the benefits of running more workloads on fewer physical servers. There are obvious cost benefits to consolidating server workloads such as reducing power consumption, datacenter footprints and cooling costs. However, in many cases business also experience an increase in complexity due to the necessary introduction of new management tools needed to manage virtual resources in addition to existing physical resources.

Recent research indicates many businesses which have adopted virtualization are still lacking a desired level of agility to more effectively and economically run their datacenters and the applications and services they depend on. This desire for greater agility in the datacenter is a primary motivator driving these businesses to consider creating and offering private cloud resources beyond simple virtualization.

Creating a private cloud dramatically changes the way businesses produce and consume IT services by creating a layer of abstraction over pooled IT resources. The creation of this abstracted private cloud fabric enables the offering of infrastructure service capability with the promise of agility, economics, and focus that can unlock new innovation and transform the role of IT in driving business success.

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Why Choose a Microsoft Private Cloud?

Microsoft private cloud solutions are built on Windows Server and System Center technology leveraging existing IT resources you already know and own. What that means is that if you run and manage an IT environment today that is heterogeneous, with a mix of server operating systems and hypervisors, you can build private clouds with Microsoft’s solution. The Microsoft private cloud lets you keep what you’ve got and make the move to private cloud now. That’s because it’s built from the bare metal up to enable process automation and configuration across platforms and environments. You can manage virtual machines running on hypervisors from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft and build hybrid clouds that span both on-premises and public clouds with these same virtual resources. You can also continue to run and monitor Windows, Linux and Unix flavors of operating systems using a single console. Because the Microsoft private cloud provides comprehensive management of heterogeneous IT environments, you can put your business’s needs ahead of the needs of any particular technology or vendor.

Creating Private Clouds

For more than 15 years, Microsoft has some of the world’s biggest and most advanced datacenters and driven the evolution of major Internet services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, and Bing. We’ve taken all that we’ve learned from this experience and put it into the DNA of our private cloud solutions.

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We’ve made it ‘button-click’ simple to create a cloud, taking what could be a complex and challenging task and making it easy with a wizard driven process. We’ve also built-in dynamic optimization of your underlying infrastructure resources to help enable a more productive and predictable platform on which to run your business applications and services.

Empowering the Business

We have also provided very powerful capabilities to delegate portions of our private cloud across your organization, and yet maintain the control to ensure you meet your compliance and knowledge capture requirements.

How to Get Started

If you want to get started creating private clouds today, download the Microsoft System Center 2012 Release Candidate and give it a try. You can also request to join our Community Evaluation Program.

You should also check out these related posts:

And see how our customers are benefiting from the Microsoft private cloud:

 

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David Mills
Sr. Product Manager
Microsoft