In a major development that emphasizes the growing importance of cloud technologies and how positively it is impacting the enterprise data center world, global software major Microsoft has announced that it is opening up the server and rack designs that power its vast online platforms of Azure and Office 365 and sharing them with the world, contributing towards the Open Compute Project.
Microsoft, a global software major has long been seen as an organization standing on its own standards and proprietary technology bastions. However fast emergence of cloud based infrastructure is changing the business dynamics in the enterprise space, where proprietary is not always preferred by IT leaders and hence this move is regarded by many as the one which will put Microsoft in a better position to create a better cloud ecosystem in association with other stakeholders. And as believed by many experts, this level of knowledge sharing will create better products for the enterprise cloud.
“The Microsoft cloud server specification essentially provides the blueprints for the datacenter servers we have designed to deliver the world’s most diverse portfolio of cloud services. These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and built to handle the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform. They offer dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times. We also expect this server design to contribute to our environmental sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by 10,000 tons across our base of 1 million servers”, said Bill Laing, Microsoft Corporate VP for Server and Cloud, in a blog post.
Open Azure for Enterprise
As part of this initiative, the designs and code for Microsoft’s global cloud servers will now be available for other organizations to use and this should translate towards a larger ecosystem of vendors being able to build hardware based upon these Microsoft designs.
As most of IT leaders look for such opportunities to design their own cloud based on their requirements, this will encourage more number of enterprise to create hybrid Windows Azure cloud infrastructure, which can run on the same hardware across its own data centers and embrace Microsoft cloud.
It may be recalled that the Open Compute Project or OCP was founded by social networking major, Facebook in the year 2011 to take the concepts behind open source software and create an “open hardware” driven movement to build widely used systems and create agile data centers that better suit enterprise environments.
Competition in the Cloud
Microsoft’s move to align with Open Compute reflects the intensifying competition in cloud services, where Microsoft, Google and Rackspace are among the players seeking to wrest share from market leader Amazon Web Services. Tapping the OCP’s nimble ecosystem of hardware vendors could accelerate innovation on Microsoft’s cloud platform, resulting in an integrated hybrid cloud platform that can keep pace with AWS.
