Azure Stack Hopes to Succeed Where Private Clouds Fail

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Last month, Microsoft partner HPE told attendees of its HPE Discover conference in London that Azure Stack – Microsoft’s data center operating platform – would be available within the next six months.

This week in an interview with Network World, Microsoft Azure corporate vice president Jason Zander expanded a bit on Azure Stack and how it will address the challenges that companies have had implementing private clouds.

“What we’ve tried to do is figure out what are the things that make private cloud implementations fail. If people have tried using other software solutions or building their own, why have they failed?” Zander said.

Azure Stack’s converged appliance is being worked on with Microsoft partners HPE, Dell, and Lenovo, and will include the hardware and software – two key elements that it must get right to succeed where other private clouds may have failed.

“We try to make sure you have software that can really deliver a cloud pattern, not just VM automation, but an actual cloud pattern with containers and PaaS and all the rest of the things you expect in a cloud. The other piece is hardware and getting that right, making sure it can handle the new cloud patterns. We put those two things together and that is what Azure Stack represents.”

“You’ve also seen from us Project Olympus and some of the work we’ve done with the Open Compute Project. Those are also part of that same strategy to make sure that that kind of converged hardware/software solution that we’re making is something that we can both share with the industry and also drive to scale.”

The hope is that Azure Stack will enable a consistent cloud environment for on-premises and the public cloud.

“It’s not so much that we’re just tacking things together as much as we’ve actually made very deep R&D investments to make sure that that the hybrid world is something you can actually materialize and get a lot of value out of on day one.”

This article first appeared here, on Talkin' Cloud.