Microsoft to flesh out further its private cloud strategy

Microsoft is crystalizing its "private cloud" positioning and plans to run it by the 6,000 or so partners attending its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this week.

Microsoft officials previously have said that they won't allow customers to run the Microsoft Azure cloud operating system on customers' on-premise servers, but that they will make available to users many of the advances in Windows Server, System Center, Hyper-V and other Microsoft technologies so users can create their own "private clouds."

Microsoft is expected to tout its Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Enterprises at the show. The product, originally expected to ship by the end of 2009 -- according to a private cloud fact sheet that was on Microsoft's site earlier today but is gone -- is now slated for the first half of 2010. It is a "free, partner-extensible toolkit that will enable datacenters to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage resources to enable IT as a service." Microsoft already offers a version of the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for its hosting partners.

The Enterprise version of the toolkit is available to enterprise customers, systems integrators and independent software vendors. According to Microsoft's site,, the toolkit includes an architectural roadmap, deployment guidance, best practices, tools (to help users move existing apps to the cloud?) and unnamed technologies that will provide "interoperability with public clouds."

Microsoft is attempting to make the distinction between its private and public cloud solutions more concrete. On its Private Cloud subsite within its wider Virtualization site, Microsoft is providing definitions of its on-premise and off-premise datacenter offerings. According to the site:

"Private Cloud - an internal service-oriented environment optimized for performance and cost that is deployed inside a customer’s datacenter. Powered by packaged server products including Windows Server and Microsoft System Center family of products, private cloud provides compatibility with existing applications.

"Public Cloud - provided by service providers and offering customers the ability to deploy and consume services. In this category, Azure is a highly scalable services platform providing pay–as-you-go flexibility delivered from Microsoft’s datacenters."

While it may not be the Azure OS itself that Microsoft is providing to datacenter users who want to host their own data rather than having Microsoft or its partners do it for them, Microsoft is playing up the similarities between the on-premise and hosted approaches. The tag line from Microsoft's cloud computing subsite:

"By providing tools that enable customers to manage their fabric and deliver services, Microsoft is providing customers the foundation for cloud computing."

Do you think Microsoft is just rebranding its existing datacenter software as "private-cloud"-capable? Or does Microsoft's private-cloud tools and software give it a leg up over Amazon and Google?

In related news, Microsoft is expected to unveil Azure pricing and licensing on Tuesday, July 14, at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

(Thanks to Oakleaf Systems' Roger Jennings for the pointer to the Microsoft cloud information site.)