In July last year, cloudcomputing.info reported about the fact that Microsoft was planning on launching a version of Azure, codenamed Talisker which could run on-premises. At that time, Microsoft confirmed that Dell, Fujitsu, HP who would manufactur and use it internally, and eBay would be the fourth early adopter.
Now Fujitsu and Microsoft have announced that they will ship an Azure Appliance in August this year. The platform includes Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. Microsoft claims that it can scale put applications across tens-of-thousands servers. The Appliance will be hosted at the Fujitsu datacenters in Japan. Fujitsu is already running the service as a trial for 20 companies, and calls it the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform service (FGCP/A5).
The hardware provided by the OEMs, matching reference specifications from network, storage and servers defined by Microsoft and is a 64bit platform only.