Windows Azure Appliance
Delivering the power of Windows Azure in your datacenter.
The Windows Azure™ appliance is a turnkey cloud computing solution that customers and partners can deploy in their own datacenter, across hundreds to thousands of servers. The Windows Azure appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. This hardware will be delivered by a variety of partners.
The appliance is designed for service providers, large enterprises and governments and provides a standardized environment, with software updated by Microsoft, and innovative automation and management technologies to deliver the lowest cost of operations.
Use the Windows Azure Appliance to:
- Realize the benefits of Windows Azure in
your own datacenter while maintaining physical control, data sovereignty and
regulatory compliance.
- Offer scale-out applications and data services in your own datacenter or for your customers.
- Deploy a proven cloud that can scale to tens of thousands of servers.
Windows Azure Appliance Benefits:
Operational Efficiency:
- Datacenter efficiency – proven to run at low cost of operations across hundreds to thousands of servers with a small ratio of IT operators to servers and more efficient power, cooling and server utilization
- Massive scale – ability to scale from hundreds to tens-of-thousands of servers.
- Elasticity – ability to scale from one to thousands of application instances depending on demand
- Integration – with existing infrastructure services and operations
- Multi-tenancy – designed for multi-tenancy across business units or organizations
- Service availability – Designed for high availability via fault tolerance and self-healing capabilities
Development Flexibility:
- Open and flexible – build and host applications and data services using the open and familiar development tools and frameworks available for Windows Azure.
- Consistent – run applications built for Windows Azure on any Windows Azure appliance with confidence
- Comprehensive – take advantage of extensive Windows Azure capabilities to build more sophisticated hybrid solutions spanning on-premises infrastructure and the cloud
Physical Control:
- Control – run Windows Azure in your datacenter with complete control over the infrastructure and operations
- Data privacy – keep sensitive applications and data on-premises to meet state or local regulatory compliance requirements
- Physical proximity – maintain proximity to mission-critical systems and host applications with lower latency requirements or dedicated network connectivity
Windows Azure Appliance Availability:
The appliance is currently in Limited Production Release to a small set of customers and partners. We are developing our roadmap based on what we learn from this set of customers and partners. We have no additional details to share at this time.
Who is Using the Appliance?
The current Limited Production Release partners are Dell, eBay, Fujitsu and HP.
Fujitsu launched the Fujitsu Global Cloud (FGCP/A5) service in August 2011, running on a Windows Azure appliance at their datacenter in Japan. Dell and HP also intend to use the appliance to offer private and public cloud computing services based on Windows Azure, while eBay is evaluating ways in which the Windows Azure appliance can help improve engineering agility and reduce operating costs for eBay.com .