On August 10 – 12 I attended HostingCon 2009 in Washington D.C. It was a great show and below are some of my observations from the week.
 
On Wednesday I did a presentation called Microsoft Virtualization to deliver Cloud Services. There were  40+ attendees, which was very good attendance for the show. The session focused on:

  • New availability of Hyper V in Windows Server 2008 R2 and installation experience of the upgrade
  • Availability of bits for Windows Server 2008 R2 on SPLA
  • Delivery of Dynamic Data Center and deployment and go to market options
  • Cross platform support in SCVMM
  • SPLA pricing of Windows Server 2008 R2 (outsourcing/non-out sourcing)
Virtualization was one the key themes from the show and on Tuesday, Zane Adam from Microsoft also presented a key note called Virtualization: Enabling Hosting Providers to be successful in the New era of Software + Services. Zane made some really good points I thought would be worth sharing.  He stressed that it’s important for hosters to differentiate themselves based on the services they offer, not just on cost, and that it’s imperative for leading edge hosters to never have any downtime. He also noted that the next big thing is elastic computing, the ability to add capacity on demand.
 
One of the biggest draws at HostingCon this year was the Cloud Computing panel, with Zane Adam of Microsoft, as well as representatives from Google, SalesForce.com, and Rackspace. Zane talked about Azure and the emerging partner opportunity and power of choice to allow hosters to differentiate with a rich, powerful cloud offering based on the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, and another major point was that Microsoft supports Linux today and will support Red Hat VMs on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Google stressed that the consumer and business flexibility are key priorities. I found it a little surprising that SalesForce had some skepticism of the differentiation between private and public clouds. Overall, everyone agreed that multi-tenant architecture is key for cloud computing.