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How MS aims at VMware with Windows Server 2012

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Srikanth Karnakota, director, Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft and Kumaran Mudaliar, vice president, technology, ISGN in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talk about Microsoft's Server 2012, which gives it a reason to tighten its grip in the private cloud world. Excerpts:

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CIOL: Why is it dubbed the 'first Cloud OS'?

Srikanth Karnakota: This product redefines what Cloud OS is. A Cloud OS should be able to move its operating system responsibilities from running a single server to running multiple massive data centres of a public cloud.

Windows Server and Windows Azure form the core building blocks of the cloud OS. Windows 2012 powers that Cloud OS for three reasons.

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Boundary less cloud: Public, private and hybrid clouds all work in conjunction so that your application can move across these environments seamlessly.

Platform for modern applications: Cloud OS should help you to connect with multiple socio or Big Data scenario.

Empowering IT: Today IT has restrictions in terms of devices or form factors that they can support. This helps them to manage devices with same set of security and control irrespective of devices.

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Windows Server is about massive scale, seamless services at the lowest price point stack and price performance ratio.

CIOL: However, aren't there other platforms, from VMware or Google, doing the same?

Srikanth Karnakota: Windows Server 2012 is not the cloud OS, but it is the core tenet of Cloud OS. Google, Amazon are all on public cloud, but what do they run in their private data centres? Nothing. VMware is all about private cloud, that sits in their data centre. What do they have in public cloud? Very little.

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So, a Cloud OS is not either of them. A Cloud OS is a combination of public, private and hybrid cloud management capability.

Today, VM portability is a big issue. People are seeking for flexibility with which IT can deploy VM in their own data centre, in another data centre and also move it to a public cloud like Azure (an infrastructure as a service), in a seamless manner.

Windows Server 2012 can run four times the VMs than the previous update. Its memory can scale from 64 GB to ITB per VM. It can give three times the IO output than its competitor and can support 320 logical processors.

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It supports ODX (Offload Data Transfer) protocol, which allows data to be moved among different server nodes without the need of the server CPU. Data can be thus moved within one-tenth of the time than before.

It is the power of several servers but hold up into one. Windows Server can do 17 different server roles.

It has Active Directory, with which user authentication can be done across clouds and System Centre Management tool that gives single pane of glass view of all clouds, no matter whether it is VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix. This redefines the way a server operating system will perform. No one goes to this extreme limits.

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Windows server 2012 goes beyond virtualization. Virtualization is only the first step in optimizing your hardware, but there are so many other costs to be saved at the higher level and it will happen only when you actually embrace private cloud.

Kumaran: VMware, Citrix, Google, and Microsoft till now, have been talking only about virtualization. Virtualization is just a part of cloud. With Windows Server 2012, you can combine 40 servers with one template and make it as self service portal, unlike in a virtualization world where we can only create templates of a particular VM and thus ending up creating multiple VMs.

Windows Server 2012 is cloud, where you can build an entire system in a couple of hours, unlike in a virtualization world, where it takes a week or two.

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Creating VM creation is very easy across all platforms, but setting up a self service system is difficult. Server 2012 can do it because it is storage and database agnostic, and also has in-built storage and network virtualization support. Thus we can move VMs across different clouds without worrying about storage or back-up. Whereas, in a virtualization world in oder to move a VM, you have to first move the storage.

DR applications is also simple in this and you can even move it to a desktop because Windows 2012 has SMB 3.0 protocol, a file server download protocol, which speeds up file throughput.

It also helps is cost saving as you can scale up the hardware and use the hardware to its full capacity. In virtualization world there used to be limitations in terms of how much you can scale up to. So you have to duplicate servers, which means more licences.

CIOL: Will this increase your share in the Hypervisor market, as against your competitor VMware?

Srikanth Karnakota: Yes, by huge margins, because for the first time, in the last two years, we gained share, twice as fast as VMware, worldwide. This happened two months back. Now, with 2012 Cloud OS, we are looking to dramatically improve this, maybe by four times faster. We will be the private cloud leader.

If you look at VMware they still are a virtualization company. That is where they make most of their revenue from. Nicira gives them an additional capability, however, we already have that in our platform. The Windows Server's network virtualization capability enables you to isolate network, hardware switches, and vLANs.

You should also look at the cost capability as well. VMware reworked on their licence and that was a disaster. However, their offerings are still four or five times more expensive than ours, despite lacking the features that we have on it.

They have multiple products patched together in one suite and are still talking about private cloud. Whereas, we are talking about all three, which VMware cannot do and will have tough time matching up

CIOL: Why did it take four years to come out with an update?

Srikanth Karnakota: It takes time to accomplish these capabilities as it calls for high level of engineering. We are very happy that we took that time because this is going to change the landscape of how people will compute. You will see what will happen to our virtualization share within a period of one year.

It will take a long time for anyone to come to this level and even if they reach, it will be still on the underlying platform that we run. VMware virtualizes on our Windows Server. They do not won an OS, neither does Amazon.

We are today anyway way better in the virtualization space. And, when you also own the underlying layer, then there are a whole bunch of things you can do on it, that too at no additional cost for an additional box.

smac