Cool Article on the Dell/Azure announcement

Monday, as part of Microsoft’s big Azure announcement, we announced that we would be both building an Azure appliance, enabling customers to build their own public or private clouds, as well as developing an Azure public cloud at Dell that our customers can use to develop and deploy next generation services on.

There has been a ton of press surrounding this move by Microsoft to broaden the market for Azure, an effort which also includes similar agreements with HP and Fujitsu. Not surprisingly, my favorite article is one by Charles King that came out yesterday in eCommerce Times — Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Dell: Blue Skies Ahead.

Check out these excerpts and you’ll see why :)

Dell is out of the blocks and running with Azure while its rivals are still sorting out their gym bags.

Dell’s cloud efforts tend to be one of the company’s best kept secrets. Some vendors’ continual cloud pronouncements tend to blend into a vuvuzela-like drone, but Dell has simply gotten down to the hard work of building workable commercial cloud and hyper-scale data center solutions during the past three years.

In fact, Dell was the first major vendor to launch a business unit specifically focused on the commercial cloud. By doing so, the company’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) organization has gained invaluable hands-on expertise about the specialized needs of organizations leveraging cloud technologies for applications including hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, energy social networking and SaaS. That point likely influenced Microsoft’s 2008 decision to choose Dell as a primary infrastructure partner in developing the Azure platform.

Cool stuff!

Pau for now…

About the Author: Barton George