Microsoft Pushes Private Cloud Computing Forward With System Center 2012

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson introduced the new System Center 2012, which will enable IT managers to deliver private cloud services that empower business teams, provide greater insights into application performance, and allow IT to carry forward current investments as they adopt public cloud computing.

“Our IT customers have told us that their focus is helping their businesses deliver the critical applications that will strengthen their bottom line, while maintaining necessary control and compliance,” Anderson said. “Virtualization and server consolidation are important steps toward cloud computing, but it’s essential to have management tools that provide intelligence about how the apps themselves are doing, not just management of virtual machine black boxes. Microsoft’s management solutions provide that insight, along with the needed oversight.”

System Center 2012, slated for release later this year, enables IT managers to build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today — including other vendors’ platforms and virtualization technologies. In his keynote, Anderson demonstrated the Virtual Machine Manager capability in System Center 2012, available today as a beta release at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/try-it.aspx. Using this core component of Microsoft private cloud solutions, IT managers can efficiently standardize infrastructure and application services and delegate them to business partners for fast deployment of applications.

Anderson also showed code name “Concero,” the new System Center 2012 capability that empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure while helping IT managers deliver greater flexibility and agility to their business teams.

“The move to cloud computing significantly raises the bar for what is expected in enterprise management solutions,” said Chris Wolf, research vice president at Gartner. “It’s easy for a vendor to create a tool that automates the creation of a virtual machine and call it ‘cloud management.’ However, the real value of IT management comes from keeping a service up and running, which means tools that automate configuration and operations must take advantage of application knowledge to ensure an optimal life cycle. Organizations should take this management paradigm shift as an opportunity to reassess current processes and move forward with a platform capable of meeting the complex demands of tomorrow’s cloud-enabled IT services.”

System Center 2012 solutions will enhance the current Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud programs and offerings for private cloud computing, including the ability to best manage virtualized workloads.