Mary Jo Foley has the scoop on this story on ZDNet, about how Microsoft will sell packaged on-premises Azure (Hyper-V, System Center, and Windows Azure Pack) private or hosted (private or public) clouds through hardware partners. She asks a question: which vendors can offer this solution, which uses Storage Spaces for the Hyper-V VM storage. That is easy enough to answer, as of right now, thanks to the limited number of traditional server PLUS storage vendors in the Storage Spaces HCL category. This includes:
- Fujitsu: who are not exactly a big player outside of government (at least here in Ireland)
- Super Micro: A company that builds specifically to order, and doesn’t seem to understand channel sales like a HP, Dell, Fujitsu, etc – mainly a data center player and not a packaged solution vendor.
- Dell
And that’s where I think we’ll see Microsoft make a play. Microsoft invested billions into Dell. Dell has 2 JBOD models for Storage Spaces. They sell the types of servers that Microsoft envisions for use in a cloud (half U servers). And Dell is the sort of company that sells packaged solutions.
And before you comment: No; I have not mentioned HP. HP has no certified Storage Spaces JBODs, as you can clearly see in the Storage Spaces HCL category. And anyway, HP want to push other things that are not in the Cloud OS vision and compete with Windows Server, System Center, and Azure.
But who knows – it’s just bang on 4 years since Microsoft announced that there would be third-party Azure appliances and they never appeared. Maybe nothing will happen of this – it’s hard to package up a Microsoft solution now because their Cloud OS products are upgrading way too quickly for a big company like Dell to keep up with.