During TechEd Europe in November last year, Microsoft announced a set of programs dubbed Hyper-V Cloud. One programme was called Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track, and was developed and executed in partnership with six OEMs: Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi/HDS, HP, IBM and NEC, providing reference architectures for private Hyper-V powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
At that time cloudcomputing.info concluded that appearantly there was no difference between a bleuprint for cloud computing and one for virtualization for these vendors, while other vendors just provided a landing page.
In February this year, Microsoft published a blog article giving more information about the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, detailing more about what the programme exactly consists of by releasing a whitepaper titled: Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program – Reference Architecture Technical White Paper which provides an overview of Microsoft guiding principles and design criteria for this solution, and how our Hyper-V technology cloud solution conforms to these principles.
This week storage company NetApp announced that it has joined the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track programme, by releasing a paper titled: NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco. The paper which consists of 57 pages, details a reference architecture (coming from the Architectual Technical White Paper) – with NetApp storage using Cisco hardware.