Recently, Arthur Cole of IT Business Edge spoke with Phil Brotherton, the vice president of Microsoft Business Unit of NetApp, and discussed how the company’s new product – the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track – is intended to help businesses manage their clouds.
Fast Track is a pre-validated private cloud option that allows businesses not only to take advantage of cloud benefits like scalability and flexibility, but to still retain and integrate legacy systems. The idea behind the Fast Track system is to provide a unified environment for cloud growth, an idea that has already drawn adopters such as Cisco and NetApp.
When asked what some of the principal problems with moving a traditional infrastructure to the cloud were, Brotherton indicated that there is a current lack of clarity about what additional capabilities are needed before a move to the cloud from a virtualized environment can occur; further, that he sees four fundamental elements that are essential in moving to a cloud service: service analytics, meter usage, automation, and self-service. Without these, the movement to a cloud could potentially do more harm than good.
In addition, Brotherton mentioned that early cloud solutions tended to integrate only loosely with enterprise applications, limiting the functionality of the cloud on a broader level.
Hyper-V Fast Track is designed to offer clients pre-validated private cloud architecture, which will provide not only the features mentioned by Brotherton, but also allow a far easier movement from a VPS or internal server structure to a cloud or hybrid cloud model.
Microsoft is seeking to position itself as a leader in both the private and public cloud services by giving companies not only the choice of what type of cloud they use, but the ability to integrate it with legacy systems as well.
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