Three questions to ask when considering Microsoft Azure

Cloud computing is, for some, a means of escaping from the clutches of traditional computer and software vendors. Most enterprises realize that the value of cloud will depend on how well services integrate with their own IT commitments and investments.

Because Microsoft is so much a part of internal IT, Microsoft's cloud approach is especially important to users. Many will find it compelling; others may decide it's impossible to adopt. Which camp are you in?

The foundation of Microsoft Azure's value proposition is the notion that users must design their enterprise IT infrastructure for peak load and high reliability operation, although both of these requirements waste a lot of budget dollars. The Azure solution is to draw on cloud computing to fill processing needs that exceed the long-time average. It also backs up application resources to achieve the necessary levels of availability, if normal data center elements can't provide those levels.

This means that Azure, unlike most cloud architectures, has to be based on elastic workload sharing between the enterprise and the cloud. They accomplish this by adopting many service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts, including workflow management (the Azure Service Bus).

VMware vCloud Director 1.5: Small but definitive step forward

Along with the release of vSphere 5, widely acclaimed as a technical success and a potential licensing crisis, VMware has unveiled vCloud Director 1.5 Both are not available yet, but the details have been released. Users hail it as a great start to getting a viable private cloud from VMware.

Overall, however, vCD deployment remains very low, with lighthouse cases in some enterprise test and dev environments and most traction at service providers. Private organization adoption is sparse; one person listed as a vCloud Director customer by VMware and contacted for this story did not know if they were using the product and thought a former graduate student may have experimented with it at some point.

That might begin to change since, most importantly, deployment options for vCloud Director (vCD) have changed. It still needs to be deployed to a dedicated server host running RHEL, but it now supports Microsoft SQL 2005 and 2008 databases for a backend, and VMware promises more database support to come.

"To be honest, the biggest thing that stopped us going forward was the Oracle licensing," said Gurusimran Khalsa, systems administrator for the Human Services Division of the State of New Mexico. He said his agency had already endured several years of consolidation and virtualization and vCloud Director looked attractive. HSD even bought a few licenses to experiment with but never used them because the requirement for Oracle was something the division had successfully dodged in the past and wasn’t about to sacrifice for vCD.

What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis.