Microsoft Targets Data Center With Windows Server 2012

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Microsoft Server and Tools President Satya Nadella calls Windows Server 2012 a cornerstone of the company's "Cloud OS" strategy. (Photo: Microsoft Corp.)

In an online event Tuesday Microsoft (MSFT) announced the general availability of Windows Server 2012. Microsoft Server and Tools Business President Satya Nadella called Windows Server 2012 a cornerstone of the company's "Cloud OS" strategy, providing one consistent platform across private, hosted and public clouds.

Built from the Cloud up

Nadella set the stage for this large transformation that the company is making for the era of the cloud operating system this past summer at the Microsoft TechEd 2012 conference.  On Tuesday he reiterated that the new release is is the cloud-optimized server OS for customers of all sizes.

The focus for building the Cloud OS centered on four things, starting with the data center.  With the transformation of the data center Microsoft seeks to bring together all of the resources provided by a traditional data center – storage, networking and computing – into one platform that scales elastically with an organization’s needs. Microsoft says it built Windows Server 2012 from the "cloud up," applying its experience operating global data centers that rely on hundreds of thousands of servers to deliver more than 200 cloud services. The other areas of focus were API's and runtimes, ensuring personalized services and experiences for users, and to enable data of any size or type to be stored anywhere and processed in any style.

In his blog post,Nadella said that consistency will empower customers to use its platform, and that "consistency is not a statement about packaging or offers, but rather about the underlying technology designs, in which virtuous cycles of development drive both Windows Server and Windows Azure and the key technologies that span both."

"Windows Server 2012 revolutionizes how we can operate our data center, allowing us to better meet our commitments,” said Bryan Garcia, chief technology officer at Equifax. “The new high availably technologies help us deliver ‘always-on’ applications, and we’re betting on Hyper-V as a critical component of our private cloud strategy. We are gaining tremendous efficiencies, which translate into more time to innovate for company growth.”

Videos from the global online event can be found here, and the online conversation at #WinServer.

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