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In the last post we discussed in great detail the process of carefully planning your Hybrid Cloud . The planning process is vital, and in this post we’ll see the time spent planning really start to pay off. In this post I’ll discuss the 4 Steps that I believe are crucial when Building any Hybrid environment...

This might seem like an overly obvious statement, but it is worth emphasizing: The early planning stages of your Hybrid Cloud strategy are some of the most important discussions that IT leaders and implementers can have. The majority of the CIOs I’ve spoken to over the last year tell me that they are...

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 Hybrid Clouds, as well as the tools available...

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 how this strategy is different from what other cloud...

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. You can read it here , compliments of Microsoft. In...

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 to the unique and changing needs of that business...

After nearly 40 years of creating enterprise software, there are few companies who have come to appreciate the importance of infrastructure in the quite the way we have at Microsoft. We recognize that to host great software and great apps, you need an equally great infrastructure for your datacenter...

The IT industry never slows down and IT pros are constantly assessing what’s next and what’s best – not only for their business , but also for their careers . The virtualization world is going through a big inflection point, and this is leading to a lot of noise and conflicting information in the marketplace...

To wrap up our nine-part series on the new 2012 R2 wave of products , I sat down stood up with Rick Claus from The Edge Show to talk about the third pillar of the R2 release:  Enable Modern Business Apps . As always, it was a lot of fun to sit down and talk about the solution-focused nature of 2012...

Earlier this week I got to deliver a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2013.  It was a lot of fun, and pretty exciting to be the first Microsoft exec to talk to this massive and important part of the IT industry. In case you missed it, you can check out the full keynote here , or the highlights below...

For years Microsoft and Oracle have helped customers address enterprise technology needs, and during those years I’ve had the opportunity to personally partner with, compete with, and admire Oracle as an industry leader. Certainly when you think of enterprise scalability and reliability Oracle comes...

Last week I got to sit down with the guys from TechNet Radio and talk about the 2nd big pillar in the What’s New in 2012 R2 series:  Transform the Datacenter . In this episode – which is a follow up to our earlier (and very popular) discussion about PCIT – we get deep on how this R2 wave of products...

Part 7 of a 9-part series . Today’s post is the 2nd of two sections; to read the first half, click here .       As an industry we have worked on disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) solutions for – well, it seems like forever.  There has been a lot of good work...

Part 7 of a 9-part series . Today’s post is the first of two sections; to read the second half, click here . One of the foundational requirements we called out in the 2012 R2 vision document was our promise to help you transform the datacenter. A core part of delivering on that promise is enabling Hybrid...

  Part 5 of a 9-part series . Today’s post has two sections; the second half is here . One of the industry metrics that I follow closely every quarter is the sale of x86 servers around the world. I look at the trends around the purchase of the server hardware (what is the growth rate, where are...

  Part 4 of a 9-part series . The Common Engineering Criteria (CEC) that I’ve talked about in previous posts have been instrumental in ensuring that the teams contributing to 2012 R2 met rigorous and specific criteria in areas like Manageability, Virtualization Readiness, Data Center & Enterprise...

Back in May , I discussed how technologies such as Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V, and System Center 2012 SP1, provide the most scalable, reliable, and feature-rich platform to run key, tier-1 workloads like SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange, at the lowest cost. To help customers virtualize these workloads...

The new Hyper-V features introduced by Windows Server 2012 were game changing for the IT industry, and the impact has been so positive that, just about every customer I speak with is conducting their own tests on Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V as their hypervisor. This is so common that I’ve gotten...

Back in mid-April, I discussed the importance of data center high availability , and how the cost of data storage is minimal compared to the cost of not being able to access that data. There are a lot of options for creating a highly available system with disaster recovery and data backup protocols ...

I’ve heard IT departments all over the world share a very similar joke about how the rest of the company has no idea where their e-mail comes from or where their SharePoint sites are stored – they just want these things to be there when they need them. IT departments, however, do know exactly where these...

In this episode, I take a look at the topic of high availability, back up, and disaster recovery.  These are incredibly important topics for businesses that depend on consistent access to corporate data, and whose customer base insists on avoiding any downtime.  Regular readers of the blog...

In this episode I talk about the Hybrid Cloud and CRN 's recent piece entitled "Microsoft Leaps Ahead of VMware in Hybrid Cloud Management."  You can read my post on this same topic from late last week here . As always, if you have questions or topics you’d like to hear addressed on an...

From the comments I’ve seen on Twitter and the e-mails hitting my inbox, I know that many of you have seen CRN’s article from last week entitled “ Microsoft Leaps Ahead of VMware in Hybrid Cloud Management ” – and I want to add a couple thoughts to John Ross’ analysis of the cloud marketplace. Something...

Several weeks ago I met with a customer who expressed a very common problem: “If we can’t access our data at any moment, from any location, we immediately begin losing money.” This comment was made before any other topic we discussed that day – before concerns about app management, security, or even...