News from Tech Ed 2010 North America rolls in and we have the announcements of Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Béta for July 2010. Exchange 2010 SP1 Béta became available today! I’m grabbing it 🙂
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the the final releases of the products be announced at Tech Ed 2010 EMEA. Now I also wouldn’t mind if they came sooner due to the new and improved feature set both service packs offer, but I’m not really counting on that.
Bob Muglia’s live streamed keynote @ Tech Ed 2010 North America is nearing it’s end by now and he’s pretty up beat about lots of subjects Visual Studio 2010, Azure, System Center, Cloud, Exchange, OCS 14, Windows Phone 7, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Bing Maps & SDK, Avatar as a cloud case study & collaboration with Microsoft etc.
Cloud is omnipresent but they talk about hybrid. Making sure Hybrid is cost effective is important to me. I don’t need more work and costs but less.
The news from TechEd are quite exciting – aren’t they? 🙂 Regarding the hybrid cloud I think I can give you some more details because I work in Windows Azure. There are several benefits but I think the most important are:
– Enable easier migration from on-premises to cloud solution. What this means is that enterprises don’t need to do the move in one big effort but can have a smooth step-by-step migration
– Enable enterprises to keep critical data in house if necessary. There is lot of concern about data security in the cloud; having hybrid solution will allow enterprises to have their computation done cheaply in the cloud and keep their data in their own data center
From IT Pro point of you there will be learning curve initially because you will need to come up to speed with the new technology. But the move is for good because it will remove the need to manage physical hardware in the cloud, OS updates and security patches can be handled automatically, and you will concentrate on just managing the applications that are crytical for you businessl.
Hope this helps.
It has indeed many promises. But the path will not be as easy as it’s made out to be in all hype. I do see a hybrid world for medium to larger enterprises with easy and automated migration of virtual servers and applications to and from the cloud. It’s good to see the cloud buzz from Tech Ed 2008, which was the first real wake up call, starting to materialize. The moment we can get our hands on Systesm Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext we’ll start testing it in the labs, the demo’s are pretty nice. Azure is allready being experimented with by a bunch of the devs I know. The pain points are indeed security but also the fact that there is no commodity cloud player. How about second sourcing? Transportability? Brokers to spread risk over multiple cloud provider? I’m not concerened about the learning curve that is a constant factor, no news there. And yes less worry about updates and patches, but also less hardware to deal with. I’m curious to see it work with complex needs and how vendors will respond. They need trust and for that they will need to avoid the “telco” mentality as cloud providers or they’ll have lot but very unsatisfied customers. Than agian, being able to become a giant billing machine like a telco must be very attractive. What about the legal issues if you buy cloud from a broker and your servers are spread around the world with different vendors? They wave that last issue away very easily but ourlawyers, governments and the EU certainly do not, not yet anyway.
Take care