Microsoft taps partners to sell Azure and take on Amazon in cloud

Microsoft has a big channel and soon it will arm them with Azure

Microsoft distributors will soon be able to resell the company's Azure cloud IaaS, Microsoft announced today in a blog.

The move is welcomed by at least some Microsoft partners who are excited about the opportunity of offering customers more services. Previously Azure users had to buy directly from Microsoft.

Microsoft is allowing its distributors to resell Azure by expanding the company’s Open Licensing practice. This allows the distributor to resell an Azure license to a customer. Vendors will use tokens which are worth $100 Azure credits that will be distributed to customers. Doing so will give resellers the ability to manage Azure clouds for customers, as well as bundle other services on top of the Azure virtual machines, storage and databases. Resellers can bundle an Office 365 app, or backup and recovery services, for example.

Customer may be more inclined to buy services like Azure through a partner that they have an existing relationship with as opposed to buying directly through an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

Aidan Finn is a technical sales lead for Microsoft reseller MicroWarehouse Ltd. in Ireland and in blogging about the news today noted that it will make Azure more appealing, particularly to small and midsize businesses that may not be big enough for an EA but perhaps don’t have the in-house expertise to consume cloud without assistance. Some partners were even already buying blocks of Azure services and reselling them without the official Open License, Finn said. “The move to Open was necessary,” Finn wrote in an email. “The opportunity to resell a service product brings partners into the fold, and gives them a reason to be interested. Without a resell opportunity, Azure could have appeared like a competitor to some partners."

The move seems like a natural one for Microsoft to make to take advantage of its large channel market, which is a differentiator for the company compared to some of its biggest rivals in Amazon and Google.

“The mechanism sounds a bit awkward, with the purchases via fixed denomination tokens rather than direct, resource utilization-based billing, but giving more efficient access to its large partner channel to its portfolio of cloud resources is good utilization of an existing strength for the company,” Stephen O’Grady, an analyst and RedMonk wrote in an email.

Microsoft announced that Open Licensing will be available starting in August.

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Google, Microsoft play catch up to Amazon, add load balancing, auto-scaling to their clouds

Cloud computing proving to be a piggy-back industry

Google Wednesday rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.

The rollout comes just a few months after Microsoft improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling features. Both companies are effectively playing catch-up with leading IaaS provider Amazon Web Services, which already offers such features.

Load balancing is a “critical” feature for any highly scalable cloud deployment, Google engineers wrote in announcing the company’s service today. It allows Google Compute Engine (GCE) to automatically and intelligently route traffic across a collection of servers. This replaces a manual process where new virtual machines (VM) would be provisioned by the user. It’s intelligent because the system can automatically check to ensure the VMs are healthy and can accept traffic. The load balancing can be configured either using a command line interface or through APIs.

Earlier this summer Microsoft released new auto-scaling features to its Azure cloud platform. That allowed similar functionality, with the ability to scale compute resources up or down compute resources in its cloud.

Both auto-scaling and load balancing are typically used to handle traffic spikes or large-scale increases or decreases in resources. The difference between the two is that auto-scaling spreads CPU workloads across a predefined cluster of servers, whereas load balancing allows network bandwidth traffic to be distributed across clusters of servers on the fly, according to a forum post on AWS’s website.

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Microsoft Hyper-V starts turning more heads

Microsoft virtualization technology still has uphill battle vs. VMware, but third-party support making Hyper-V more alluring to customers

About three years ago Embotics jumped into developing support in its private cloud management platform for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, hopeful that the VMware virtualization challenger would take off. When that takeoff initially stalled, Embotics curtailed its Hyper-V work to focus resources elsewhere.

But over the past six to eight months, Embotics saw a big increase in customer interest for Hyper-V -- so it resurrected its efforts and earlier this month officially rolled out support for the Microsoft platform.

"It's finally good enough," says CEO Jay Litkey of Hyper-V. "It's finally ready."

Embotics isn't alone in expanding support for Hyper-V. OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, did likewise: Hyper-V was originally supported in the project, but was later dropped until the most recent Grizzly release of the code, which now supports both Hyper-V and VMware ESX hypervisor.

Around the time of this month's Microsoft Management Summit a host of companies rolled out support for Microsoft's suite of management tools, with more than a handful of them extending their platforms to support Hyper-V. Other announcements included:

Amazon Web Services announcing its Storage Gateway now runs in Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized environments, in addition to VMware ESXi architectures. The gateway is a software appliance that acts to synchronize data between customers' on-premises data and Amazon's cloud (Simple Storage Service or S3 specifically) for file backup, disaster recovery or sharing.
Cisco now supporting Windows Server 2012, which includes Hyper-V, and Windows Systems Center VM Manager in its Unified Computing System (UCS), including the Microsoft management tools being certified to work on Nexus 1000V Series hardware, as well as on Cisco/NetApp partnership gear named FlexPod; and in Cisco/EMC partnership packages called VSPEX.

Hitachi Data Systems announcing its unified computing platform (UCP) now supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows Systems Center.
Virtual machine backup specialist Veeam announcing broader support for Hyper-V in the Virtual Lab v7 release of its Veeam Backup and Replication software, which allows users to reboot VMs directly from compressed or deduplicated backup files. Vision Solutions, another provider of disaster recovery and high availability services, expanded its support to include not only Hyper-V, but now Windows Azure, Microsoft's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud platform.

So what does it all mean? Mark Bowker, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says it's common for providers to make news at shows like the Management Summit but that "the frequency and sheer quantity of them points to something bigger. Microsoft has really come around in the last year or so." The release of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Systems Center, plus improvements to the Hyper-V virtualization platform have all caused IT professionals to take a closer look at the Microsoft's virtualization offering, he says.

It is still a bifurcated market though, with VMware's ESX hypervisor holding a dominant position. But Hyper-V is catching up and is growing market share, according to Bowker and Litkey. "In the majority of use cases, both solutions are very solid," Bowker says. "VMware still has a very significant footprint, but Microsoft has the potential to disrupt."

Microsoft makes the case that its management tools, like Windows Server and Systems Center, are part of a broader "Cloud OS" strategy that includes the company's Azure public cloud, as well as offerings from cloud service providers using the Microsoft platform. "Microsoft is the only company that offers customers the flexibility of a consistent hybrid cloud platform that spans customer datacenters, hosted service provider datacenters and the Microsoft public cloud," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. "Customers can use the same core technologies - including virtualization, systems management, identity, development tools and database - across all three clouds."
Where are the cloud providers?

But Bowker says Microsoft has not done as good of a job as VMware, OnApp and OpenStack supporters at getting third-party providers to use its cloud management technology as the basis for their offerings. Microsoft points to providers like OVH and Hitachi Systems as being among cloud service providers using Cloud OS, but there's a decided lack of brand-name providers using it. "Microsoft's Cloud OS strategy is triangular, but it really focuses on the on-premises and Azure services," Bowker says. VMware, meanwhile, has more than 100 providers using vCloud Director as the basis for their clouds, including providers it lists on its website such as Bluelock, CSC, Dell, Internap, NaviSite and Savvis.

Embotics CEO Litkey says Hyper-V as a virtualization platform still has a ways to go to catch market-leading VMware ESX. While Hyper-V improved in the last year and is a stable, solid platform, ESX outdoes it in areas such as resource contention -- distributed resource scheduling (DRS) and vMotion, for example -- as well as in automation, scheduling, affinity provisioning, memory sharing and compression.

Still, analyst Bowker says in most cases Hyper-V is a "good enough" alternative to ESX, especially since it's included at no additional cost with a Windows Systems Center license, making Hyper-V more attractively priced than VMware in many circumstances. Combined with powerful new management tools in Systems Center and Windows Server, specifically related to managing large-scale environments, Hyper-V is giving more IT professionals a reason to look at the Microsoft virtualization platform, he says.

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