November, 2013

One year ago this week, Microsoft made an investment in the future of cloud computing. This investment was intended to address one of the cloud’s most persistent issues: Enterprise-grade storage. At the time, this investment was a bit of a surprise to...

For a lot of IT pros, the last two posts ( here and here ) have been a nice overview of the Hybrid Cloud model, but they’ve been waiting to get technical. Starting with this post, I’ll begin a deep look at the specific technology that supports and maximizes...

Earlier this week I examined what we at Microsoft mean when we use the term “Hybrid Cloud.” If ever there were a time to get really specific about our vocabulary, this was it! Now that our definition is clear, I want to go one step further and discuss...

If you haven’t seen it yet, a Gartner report from last month * is really worth checking out. Gartner calls out three key areas (Acquisition costs, Ease of management, and Functionality richness), and I recommend reviewing the entire report in detail....

In any region, at any size, in any industry, an enterprise’s IT infrastructure has an enormous impact on the success of that organization. There are as many infrastructure setups and strategies as there are enterprises, with each IT team tailoring it...

Defining “Hybrid” Why Hybrid?   The Components of a Hybrid Cloud Best Practice Makes Perfect: Hybrid Cloud Best Practices Best Practices for Planning Your Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for Building Your Hybrid Cloud  (coming Tues., 12/10) Best...

Late last night I returned from Cisco’s announcement of their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) vision and offering. You can check out a quick recap video of the event at the bottom of this post. I think what Cisco announced is a game-changing...

I’m not going to try and set this video up – it speaks for itself.  Suffice it to say that it’s a very interesting (and unexpectedly hilarious) look at what the Building Clouds team has done to make migrating from VMware to Hyper-V (and Azure) very...

Just a couple years ago, Service Templates were introduced in Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM).  Service Templates represented a new way to enable complex, multi-VM services that could be quickly, easily, and accurately...