Coming This Fall: Windows Azure Cloud Appliances

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 07/14/10

Addressing one of the key objectives of cloud computing, Microsoft this week said its Windows Azure platform will be available as an appliance that can run on customer and partner premises.

The company revealed plans to offer the Windows Azure Appliance at its Worldwide Partner Conference, which began July 11 in Washington, DC. The appliance, which Microsoft has talked up conceptually for several months, will be offered later this year by key partners--initially Dell, Fujitsu, and Hewlett-Packard Co. The appliance will enable private clouds based on huge turnkey systems equipped with the Windows Azure platform, server, storage, and network infrastructure. eBay said it too will use the appliance.

"The Windows Azure appliance fundamentally takes the Windows Azure service and extends it," said Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business, speaking in the opening keynote of WPC. "It extends it to our service providers, allowing you to have exactly the same capabilities within your data center, providing that capability to your customers, and it can be extended to our larger customers that want to provide IT services within their own organizations."

Details of the new appliance were vague, including cost, configuration, and how it will be rolled out to customers. Muglia did say the new appliance is based on Windows Azure and SQL Azure with hardware specified by Microsoft, allowing service providers to either offer their own hosted Azure-based services or provision the appliances initially to large data center customers on premises. The availability of such private cloud implementations addresses issues of control and compliance that have made cloud computing unfeasible to many corporate and government customers.

"The benefits are associated with control, compliance, and keeping the data locally, data sovereignty. These are important benefits that allow for much more extensive solutions being built around this cloud environment," Muglia said.

For eBay, the appliance will ease deployment without moving its huge auction and PayPal payment processing service off premises. "If I want to deploy an application today for eBay.com within my data centers, I need to secure the hardware, provision a network, hook up the load balancer, and make it part of the infrastructure," said James Barrese, eBay's vice president of technology, speaking at a press conference following the keynote.

Dell, Fujitsu,  and HP will all offer the appliances later this year, based on pre-defined hardware specifications by Microsoft. The hardware vendors said they see opportunities for both offering hosting services to customers as well as selling systems to very large enterprises such as government agencies and large corporations.