Every now and then, an exciting or controversial issue triggers a flood of online discourse. For our Noise Filter feature, the WHIR pans the raging rivers of opinion for shining nuggets of useful commentary.
With Tuesday’s highly-anticipated launch of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft has been working hard to promote its underlying message of how the new product and its accompanying Cloud OS (based on Windows Server and Windows Azure) is a significant leap forward in the company’s cloud computing strategy.
The general availability of Windows Server 2012 comes months after its successful beta period, as well as a preview given in a session at Microsoft Partner Conference 2012.
Windows Server 2012 offers customers a single platform to manage and deliver applications and services across private, hosted and public clouds.
Ultimately, the new cloud operating system will help to improve the speed, scale and power that data centers and applications can build on.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 delivers more than 200 cloud services, along with new advancements in virtualization, storage, networking and automation.
In a post on Microsoft’s official blog Technet, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft server and tools business discussed the four major objectives that Microsoft developers addressed in building the Cloud OS.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley talked about how Microsoft’s overall cloud vision is undergoing a significant shift with the launch of Windows Server 2012.In building the Cloud OS, we are focused on four key things. First is the transformation of the data center. We want to bring together all of the resources provided by a traditional data center – storage, networking and computing – into one platform that scales elastically with an organization’s needs. Second is offering the APIs and runtimes to enable developers to create modern applications – for mobile, social and big data. A third important aspect of the Cloud OS is ensuring personalized services and experiences, so that any user on any device can access all of their data and applications. Lastly, data of any size or type, stored anywhere and processed in any style, must be a first-class citizen of the Cloud OS.
But the overarching message of launch day is that Windows Server 2012 isn’t about all the new bells and whistles in Windows Server 2012. Instead, it’s about Windows Server 2012 being a key component of Microsoft’s ‘Cloud OS’ vision and strategy — one where the very idea of what consititues an “operating system” is morphing. Microsoft execs have been wrestling with the best way to explain the company’s approach to the cloud for the past few years. “Software plus services” gave way to “We’re all in,” which later gave way to Microsoft’s public/private/hybrid messaging.
In a report via Information Week, Randy George outlined the three key changes to Windows Server 2012 over its predecessors.
Dynamic Access Control is a really cool feature of Windows Server 2012, but it’s not exactly plug and play to deploy. To be fair, any DLP package from any other vendor can be equally or even more difficult to deploy and manage… On the whole, DirectAccess is vastly improved in Server 2012. The drawback is, in order to realize many of those improvements, you need to deploy Windows 8 along with it… In Server 2012, the Server Core and full UI installation options are no longer an all or nothing proposition. That’s good news for security conscious admins, because it makes the process of hardening a Windows server playing a critical server role much easier.
In his blog post, The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy stressed how Windows Server 2012 “may be the most significant effort to date in Microsoft’s plan to change with the times.”
The company has to transition to a world where Windows and Office matter less, and sell more services via the cloud. The new servers are priced between $425 and $4,800, depending on capabilities. The hope, however, is that Microsoft will be able to sell much more online, with services like data marts for performing analytics, or extra computing capacity for heavy one-time workloads.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) released a new version of Windows for running corporate networks, trying to take share from VMware Inc. (VMW) and gain ground as companies seek to cut the cost of managing business programs. Windows Server 2012 improves features for virtualization, which allows companies to cut costs by using fewer server computers in their data centers.
Talk back: Are you planning on using Windows Server 2012? Do you think it will slingshot Microsoft’s presence in the cloud market and allow the company to compete against the VMware’s and HP’s of the marketplace? Let us know in the comments.
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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/noise-filter-windows-server-2012-hits-general-release-pushes-cloud-os-notion
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