{"id":5,"date":"2014-10-20T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2024-03-07T23:47:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T07:47:41","slug":"unveiling-the-microsoft-cloud-platform-system-powered-by-dell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/windows-server\/blog\/2014\/10\/20\/unveiling-the-microsoft-cloud-platform-system-powered-by-dell\/","title":{"rendered":"Unveiling The Microsoft Cloud Platform System, powered by Dell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes!!! At last we can talk about what we have been working on for close to 18 months – \u201cSan Diego\u201d – that was the code name for what is now \u201cMicrosoft Cloud Platform System\u201d (CPS), which was announced earlier today<\/a> by Scott Guthrie.<\/p>\n

These 18 months have been a journey for all of us in the product group. It began, as all journeys should, as conversations with our customers. What followed has evolved how we think about and engineer our products. We were struck by the large number of customers who were failing to realize the benefits of the cloud. Running one of the largest public clouds, Microsoft Azure, we know what it takes to build and run a cloud, and we wanted to see how to take these learnings, be it architectural, design, operations, or technology and help you benefit from it. We have learned a lot along the way, and want to pass on all the knowledge we have gathered onto you.\u00a0 In essence, CPS is the culmination of this experience. With Dell as our partner, we are thrilled to bring an Azure-consistent cloud-in-a-box to your datacenter.<\/p>\n

CPS \u2013 A customer-focused journey to solution delivery<\/b><\/p>\n

As we set out to build CPS, we engaged many of our Enterprise and Service Provider customers.\u00a0 What we found to be common among them was the challenge of taking hardware and software components and building them into a system that yielded robust cloud services.\u00a0 On this path too many customers were failing because of the challenges of complex system definition, hardware integration and software deployment & configuration.\u00a0 In short, too many cloud computing projects could not fulfil the anticipated promise due to cost and complexity.<\/p>\n

In building CPS, we decided to attack that problem armed with the experience of building and operating our Azure datacenters.\u00a0 First, we embarked on a system design that harvested the principles of our Azure architecture and composed a stamp-architecture that is appropriate to run in customer datacenters.<\/p>\n

A core element of this design is the work we put into failure mode analysis.\u00a0 One constant that we recognize when operating at scale is that failures will happen.\u00a0 And yet business-critical services cannot be impacted by these failures.\u00a0 The CPS system architecture includes redundancy in the physical infrastructure as well as intelligence in the software that makes the solution resilient to failures.<\/p>\n

Designing a resilient system requires a careful balance between availability and the cost of service delivery.\u00a0 As you design systems that are capable of surviving failures, it is easy to let costs balloon by over-engineering redundancy.\u00a0 Working closely with Dell, we took decisions that allowed us to strike a careful balance between the cost of the infrastructure, and productivity of the system.\u00a0 This \u201csweet spot\u201d was achieved by leveraging proven hardware components together with Microsoft\u2019s software-defined datacenter technologies.<\/p>\n

The last challenge that we took on was to minimize complexity.\u00a0 We heard from many of you that perhaps the most difficult part of complex system design is the challenges around integration.\u00a0 In CPS we worked directly with Dell and component manufacturers to ensure that drivers, firmware, software and configurations came together in a reliable way.\u00a0 We have spent month\u2019s operating and putting systems through some of the most rigorous testing that our engineers can produce.<\/p>\n

Now as we bring CPS to market, we have the confidence to not only stand behind our solution, but to proudly stand in front of it.\u00a0 In CPS, we are offering a unified support model: Microsoft.\u00a0 When customers encounter issues in a CPS environment, there is one number to call and that is ours. Of course if the issue lies in hardware, we will work with Dell to resolve it, but you as a customer are not burdened with figuring out who the responsible party is to resolve your problem.<\/p>\n

CPS \u2013 An integrated hardware and software cloud solution<\/b><\/p>\n

CPS is a pre-integrated, pre-deployed, Microsoft validated solution built on Dell hardware, Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. It combines the efficiency and agility of cloud computing, along with the increased control and customization achieved in virtualized, multi-tenant environments. CPS scales from a single rack to up to four racks and is optimized for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS for Windows and Linux) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) style deployments.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a closer look at CPS<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\"<\/a><\/td>\n\n

\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

At the hardware layer, a customer can deploy CPS in increments from one to four racks. Each rack has<\/p>\n