Microsoft To Put System Centre 2012 Into Private Cloud

Customers can also learn more about the Hyper-V Cloud programme and offerings on Microsoft’s website. Anderson also posted thoughts and insights about management and cloud computing on the Microsoft Blog.

Overall, the new System Centre 2012 capabilities announced offer a range of new features that significantly improve what the 2007 products provide. These include enhanced capabilities for data centre and cloud management, such as:

· System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2012 allows IT managers to pool and dynamically allocate virtualised data centre resources (including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware and now Xen hypervisors) and Windows Azure resources into clouds for various business groups to use in a self-service model. It includes new standardised service modelling and configuration, and image-based management — meaning IT managers can use it to manage business application services, not just virtual machines. A beta of this technology is available for download today.

· System Centre Operations Manager 2012 will fully integrate technology from the AVIcode acquisition for monitoring and provide deep insights into Microsoft .NET and J2EE applications for maximum availability and performance. It also adds new dashboarding for better service level agreement tracking and network performance monitoring.

· System Centre Service Manager 2012 will enable self-service requests from data centre managers, business unit IT managers, developers and end users (allowing a developer to more efficiently request cloud resources, for example).

· System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012 offers new enterprise-class centralised backup and protection and increased depth of support for Hyper-V and workloads such as those in SharePoint, and de-duplication support.

Adding new management tools

The new offerings also deliver completely new capabilities around data centre and cloud management, such as:

· System Centre Project code-named “Concero” empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure, while allowing IT managers to maintain visibility and control across both.

· System Centre Orchestrator (formerly Opalis) provides an IT process automation platform that orchestrates workflows across systems and tasks. This enables customers to lower their costs while improving data centre service reliability and predictability.

· System Centre Advisor (formerly code-named “Atlanta”) is a secure cloud service that assesses server configuration to help enable IT professionals to proactively avoid configuration problems.