Cloud Platform System: Azure Innovation Now in Your Data Center

Yesterday was an exciting day with the announcement of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS). It’s fantastic to finally take the wraps off of the result of a close engineering partnership between Microsoft and Dell to bring an Azure-consistent cloud in a box to our customers.

Building and operating a cloud is a complex undertaking. Integrating the hardware, installing and configuring the software, and optimizing the overall solution for performance, scale, and reliability means that many cloud deployments fall short of their goals. Many offerings in the market today deliver an integrated solution for virtualization or consolidation. Virtualization however is only one step towards cloud. To go further to deliver on the promise of a cloud, Microsoft and Dell teamed up to bring an integrated cloud solution called the Cloud Platform System (CPS) to market, lowering the risk and time required, and accelerating your journey to the cloud.

Microsoft’s knowledge from operating some of the world’s largest data centers influenced the architectural design of CPS.  Born from innovations and learnings from those cloud-scale data centers, the software-based technologies within CPS deliver optimized economics, reliability, performance and scale. 

CPS is a fully integrated, pre-configured converged system, based on Microsoft’s proven software stack of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, Windows Azure Pack, and Dell’s PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage and Dell Networking hardware. Leveraging architectural ideas from the Microsoft Azure public cloud, CPS delivers software defined functionalities like storage, networking and compute in a continuously available, resilient, as well as flexible and cost efficient solutions to our customers. CPS can go from delivery to live within days and lets you focus on the important tasks when it comes to delivering services to your users and customers.

Dell and Microsoft engineers have applied rigorous testing efforts to the CPS solution.  Each component is validated to ensure quality at an individual level; and each environment undergoes further integration testing in an intense simulated cloud environment to ensure that the hardware, firmware, drivers and software work together.  CPS arrives at your datacenter pre-built, pre-deployed, pre-configured and validated from top-to-bottom.  Just plug it in, connect to your network and your journey is complete in only days instead of weeks.

From cables to rails, from servers to software, CPS is ready to go.  CPS delivers a total Azure-consistent cloud solution to your data center, minimizing the complexity of capacity expansion.  By depending on a pre-built cloud solution from Microsoft and Dell, customers can turn their attention to serving the needs of the business. 

CPS is another important milestone in our vision of a cloud platform that includes the public, the private and the service provider cloud to deliver cloud services that fit your needs.

You can find out more about CPS here.