Microsoft is pursuing cloud solutions with some gusto, pushing its Azure cloud platform as a core component of its “mobile-first, cloud-first” strategy. However, not all customers are comfortable with giving up control so completely, and prefer to maintain their own on-premises infrastructures. With those customers in mind, Microsoft and Dell are teaming up to provide an interesting hybrid cloud alternative.
Dubbed CPS Standard (for Cloud Platform System Standard), the new solution pairs up Microsoft’s CPS family of products with Dell’s modular infrastructure solutions. The partnership will provide all the benefits of Azure with the flexibility and comfort level of on-premises architectures:
The hybrid cloud experience comes from the platform’s consistency with Azure, enabling agile deployment and operation of workloads and allowing customers to build multi-tiered, scalable applications. A fully integrated, preconfigured system, CPS Standard is purpose-built to remove many of the complexities and costs traditionally associated with hybrid cloud deployments, including the following:
• Quick time to value and operational simplicity. CPS Standard arrives ready to be plugged in and can be up and running in as little as three hours, while operations, patching and updates are simplified with an automated framework.
• Simplified business continuity. In case of a datacenter outage, CPS Standard features archival backup to Azure and failover to Azure that is easy-to-activate, reliable and cost-effective.
• Increased flexibility. Its modular design allows customers to start smaller and incrementally scale from four to up to 16 servers based on business needs.
Cloud computing is important to both Microsoft and Dell, with their CEOs waxing philosophical on the technology’s value to both of their customer bases:
“A core part of our mission to empower every organization on the planet requires us to build world-class platforms and forge deeper partnerships that help businesses of all sizes transform with digital technology,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “By expanding our longstanding partnership with Dell to offer a truly integrated hybrid cloud, we will make the cloud more accessible to organizations of all sizes with the choice and flexibility to best meet their needs.”
“Digital transformation is an imperative for business today, and we are making our customers’ journey easier and faster through adoption of hybrid cloud,” said Michael Dell, CEO, Dell. “Dell shares a vision with Microsoft that open architectures and simplified cloud management will benefit customers of all sizes, freeing them to focus on their businesses and not their technology.”
For now, CPS Standard will be available running on Windows Azure Pack, System Center 2012 R2, and Windows Server R2, but in the future will incorporate Microsoft Azure Stack. A CPS Premium offering will enable even more robust hybrid cloud solutions for the largest enterprises and service providers.
Microsoft provides significantly more details on the new offering over at the Technet blog. The following video provides a taste of how Azure functions in a local data center:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDCkiiBEVc
Dell is covering this and other strategic news at Dell World 2015, currently taking place in Austin, TX.
We’ll find out more about how Microsoft’s cloud-centric strategy is performing during their earnings report tomorrow. Tune in for more coverage as Microsoft continues to partner in pursuit of its goal of global cloud computing dominance.
