Microsoft Ups Competition in the Clouds: Releases Candidate, System Center 2012
Flying high above the stratosphere where cloud predominance is making a tech company preeminent and a minority have had the prescience, forethought and tech engineering feat to reach there, Microsoft has now joined other high flyers. Today the company is making available a release candidate for its System Center 2012 administrative suite, which will employ a new fabric controller (FC) for private cloud architectures. This strategic shift will most probably solidify its competitiveness and possibly edge it ahead of either VMware or Amazon.
Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Management and Security Division says that System Center 2012 joins eight former products into one and solves a complaint customers had, "that licensing is complex." System Center 2012 aims to simplify licensing not only by combining several former products into one but by offering just two different versions.
Microsoft's FC is hypervisor-agnostic. Formerly Microsoft's cloud platform, "Hyper-V Cloud," centered around the Hyper-V hypervisor. The new SC 2012 Datacenter's completely renovated edition and simpler licensing model supports unlimited virtual machines for the same, flat fee.
This new flat fee pricing is directly linked to the pricing offered by VMware. According to Anderson, "One thing that we see every year, when we look at the reports, is the VM density-per-server continues to get higher and higher. As customers increase their use of virtualization, with SC 2012, their costs do not increase. If they're using VMware, their costs go up linearly."
For example Microsoft estimated the costs of licensing that an enterprise would ring up for VMware vSphere 5 and related tools, for 42 2-way 6-core servers running Windows Server and a respectable 6:1 VM consolidation ratio over a three-year period. In the millions, you would be paying $3,242,000. Offering the same functionality over the same time frame, Microsoft estimates the cost with the new SC 2012 Datacenter would be $424,704, (alternative package).
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