Microsoft is building a Desktop as a Service offering running on top of its Cloud platform Azure, Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet reports. The Desktop as a Service offering is codenamed Mohoro and will be the cloud version of what Microsoft currently offers with Remote Desktop and Remote App. Mohoro can be compared with how Microsoft currently offers Windows Intune, its device management solution hosted by Microsoft which offers similar functionality to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, and now also offers integration between both products.
Year: 2013
GE joins partnership with EMC and VMware for Pivotal Initiative
The Pivotal Initiative, a single virtual organization created by the partnership of EMC and VMware, now have a new entry in the join venture, General Electric, which announced to have invested $105 million in the company.
As announced in December 2012, Pivotal is a reality, based in San Francisco and its offering is an enterprise-ready data analysis platform as a service (PaaS) based on software from both companies, the investment received from GE is supposed to be part of a plan to use Pivotal’s technologies as part of its own set of analysis services to industry.
Video: OpenStack in the Next 10 Years
On April 18 Rackspace published a video where Jim Curry, OpenStack Co-Founder and Rackspace Senior Vice President of Private Cloud; Steve Kirk, Senior Director of Global IT for Sony PlayStation Worldwide Studios; and Rob Hirschfeld, Dell Distinguished Engineer, discuss about the next decade of OpenStack.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myqKiXB7Om0[/youtube]
RightScale announces official support for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services
RightScale offering a multi-cloud management solution has announced that it now officially supports Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, which was released earlier this week. In January 2011 cloudcomputing.info already reported about RightScales plans to support Azure VMs. With the added support for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, Rightscale now supports Amazon Web Services, Datapipe, Google Cloud Platform, HP Cloud, IDCF Yahoo! Japan, Logic Works, Rackspace, Softlayer and Windows Azure and the CloudStack, Eucalyptus and Openstack Private Cloud solutions.
SUSE Collaborates with Dell
On April 16 SUSE announced the availability of Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, result of its collaboration with Dell.
Another Cloud Solution powered by OpenStack and presented at this week’s OpenStack summit, Dell SUSE product is an enterprise-class private cloud infrastructure solution which combines Dell hardware and SUSE software.
Amazon adds support for Microsoft Hyper-V to its Storage Gateway
Amazon last week announced that it added support for running its Storage Gateway on top of Microsoft Hyper-V. Amazon already supported running the Storage Gateway on top of a VMware ESXi VM. The Storage Gateway is a virtual appliance which makes Amazon S3 storage available to an on-premise environment.
The Storage Gateway keeps copies of recently accessed files on-premises, while other files are moved to Amazon S3 storage. The AWS storage gateway allows you to create two types of Storage volumes. The Gateway-Cached Volumes, which stores primary data in S3 and retains frequently accessed data locally and the Gateway-Stored Volumes, which stores all data locally with an asynchronous backup to S3. More information about how to configure the storage gateway can be found here.
Microsoft makes Windows Azure Infrastructure Services Generally Available
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering hosted on Windows Azure, which it already announced in 2010. Up until now Microsoft only offered Platform as a Service on Windows Azure. Between 2010 and today Microsoft has been building the IaaS offering extending it with additional functionality. Microsoft also added support for Windows Azure to its on-premise System Center Suite of products.
Windows Azure Infrastructure Services offers both Windows Server and Linux Virtual Machines plus Azure Virtual Network. Supported VMs available in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine Gallery are: Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 and the following Linux flavors: OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2. Also included in the release are the Big Compute VMs which Microsoft announced in November last year.
HP integrates OpenStack with HP Converged Cloud 7.2
Today, April 15, HP announced once again to reinforce its commitment to the OpenStack project with HP Converged Cloud offerings.
As declared last year, HP intended to use OpenStack technology for its public, private and hybrid cloud implementations, and it has contributed to the project focusing on the integration.
This new HP offerings includes:
Release: Embotics V-Commander 4.7.
Embotics which we know for its VM lifecycle management solution V-Commander has released version 4.7 of V-Commander adding support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager now providing a solution capable of managing multiple hypervisors following many other solutions.
The solution itself evolved from a VM lifecycle management solution into a cloud management solution offering Self-Service -, Configuration -, Change -, Lifecycle -, Performance – and Capacity Management and Chargeback. This version is the follow up of version 4.6 which was released in August last year.
Release: Microsoft Windows Azure Active Directory
During its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) event held in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD). WAAD is Active Directory hosted on Windows Azure, currently already used by Windows Azure, Windows Intune and other SaaS services provided by Microsoft. Customers can use WAAD to manage or revoke employee access to cloud based LOB applications, delivers Single Sign On and to manage federation and access for partners and customers.
Active Directory can provide Identity and Access Management and offers an enterprise grade, high availability cloud service run from 14 datacenters spread across the United States, Europe and Asia.