Let's start by talking a little bit about what trends are unfolding in the market and how they affect the data center and our customers IT investments.First, at the industry level, there is a fundamental shift toward cloud computing, and that means there is a new breed of applications that need to be built: New apps need to be able to reach cloud scale, they need to be accessible 24/7 from anywhere, and they need to be deployable on-premises, in the cloud and in hybrid environments. The consumers of these applications and data are largely end users with an increasing variety of compute devices and a mobile work style that allows them to be productive from those devices wherever they are, whenever they want. The demand for ubiquitous applications with access to data from anywhere and to anywhere and data has been triggering a data explosion, and the volume of data will continue to grow sharply (in double-digit percentages) in the future. And finally, of course, the entire way computing is being done is changing: cloud computing has replaced the tradition of tying specific applications to specific servers with the concept of pooled resources – compute, network and storage resources – that enable IT to deploy applications as elastic self-service services.
Along with these changes of what IT and their users want to be able to do have come innovations in technology that help enable and support many of the before-mentioned scenarios while allowing IT to run well-managed and efficient datacenter operations. When you talk about the modern data center, it's perhaps best to start with what's happening at the system level, what's happening with silicon, what's happening to a single blade, a single system, and then a cluster.The fundamental thing that all of us at this point are tracking pretty closely is the notion that storage, compute, and network are co-evolving.At the compute level, more powerful, multi-core chips are entering the datacenter every day, and while the density of memory keeps going up, the cost of memory keeps going down. Once you have a lot of compute power, there is not much use to it if you can't really have the IOPS that have to go with it. And so the revolution in storage, especially around tiering, is what's in full play, because the disk speed itself is not something that's going to go much faster, but at the same time the fact that SSD costs and Flash costs are coming down provides a huge opportunity for the datacenter. The trend to more performant and less expensive storage solutions means that industry-standard hardware will be used as reliable and available, low-cost storage devices. Finally, with lots of compute and storage resources, the last thing you would want is the network to become a bottleneck. But fortunately, fast interconnects between storage and compute nodes have emerged which are also driving a lot of innovation.In addition, high-speed ethernet and network offload technologies such as RDMA have become mainstream. For these reasons, on top of some of the massive component improvements, the compute, storage and networking infrastructure has converged to allow for an easy, pre-assembled appliance experience in the modern datacenter withclustered systems of multiple servers in a single enclosure.But, the key to this co-evolution of storage, compute and network is really software control. You cannot afford to have control fragmentation, because if you do that then you're not going to be able to achieve the economic benefits, the agility benefits and the innovation benefits that these new systems at high density can provide.
At Microsoft, we have been learning by delivering global scale services from our datacenters what is required from this new era of IT, and we have taken these learnings, together with the trends and technology innovations, and built them into our core products to deliver the modern platform, which we call the Cloud OS.Our unique engineering experience is at the heart of the Cloud OS and the heart of our products. We engineer from the Cloud Up which means every customer benefits from those learnings.Customers need a modern platform to take advantage of these trends across their application portfolio:Transforms the Datacenter: The unit of compute has changed from single server to the datacenter. Customers need an infrastructure which provides a generational leap in agility, delivering a highly elastic and scalable infrastructure with always on, always up services across a set of shared resources with more automated management and self-service provisioning.Enable Modern Apps: Today’s apps need to interact and exchange data with other app – apps built on multiple platforms and languages; they need to integrate social data or foster social connections among users; and they need to live on-premises or off-premises and be delivered out to multiple devices. Modern apps evolve and thus, fast time to solution and lifecycle management is critical.Unlocks Insights on Any Data: To better compete, customers need to tap into growing data volumes, especially with unstructured data, or “Big Data”, to ask new questions and discover new data sources which they can combine with existing data for new insights. Customers need to deliver data to more users with the right IT oversight to help users make faster, better business decisions. Empowers People-Centric IT: With the proliferation and range of new devices, today’s users expect to be productive wherever they choose, on whatever device they choose, and IT needs to easily manage these devices and securely deliver apps and data in an extended, mobile environment. Microsoft’s Cloud OS uniquely delivers on customer needs across these scenarios. The Cloud OS is a consistent platform with a common set of technologies you can use to develop and manage applications for all environments using the same skills, knowledge and experience:Agile development Platform: Use the tools you know build the apps you need, new modern apps and traditional apps, wherever they need to run to get to your customers or users. Those tools may be Visual Studio and .NET or open source technologies and languages, such REST, JSON, PHP, Java.Unified Dev-ops & Management: Use System Center as single pane of glass for all apps coupled with Visual Studio as common platform to build once, deploy anywhere with integration to manage apps across their lifecycles for quick time to solution and easy troubleshooting/management.Common identity: Implement Active Directory as a powerful asset across environments to help you extend your enterprise to the cloud with internet scale security using a single identity and/or securely extend apps and data to devices.Integrated virtualization: Microsoft is engineered for cloud from the metal up with virtualization built as an integrated element of the OS, not layered on the OS with no need for additional add-ons.Complete data platform: Microsoft delivers comprehensive technologies to manage petabytes of data in the cloud to millions of transactions for your most mission-critical applications to billions of rows in the hands of end users for predictive and adhoc analytics in IT-managed offerings. Microsoft uniquely delivers the Cloud OS as a consistent and comprehensive set of capabilities across your datacenter, ours or someone else’s to support the world’s apps and data anywhere.The Cloud OS is delivered via our leading enterprise server, cloud and data platform technologies: Windows Server, which is at the heart of the Cloud OS and delivers on the promises of a modern data center; it works with Windows Azure to bring you the economics, agility and innovation of cloud both on your premises and off. Windows Azure, which is an open cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. With Windows Azure and the next releases of Windows Server and System Center, there is no better platform for connecting to data and services across on-premises and public.SQL Server 2012, which helps organizations unlock breakthrough insights across the organization and quickly build solutions to extend data across on-premises and public cloud, backed by mission critical confidence. And Visual Studio 2012, which is a comprehensive family of products for every organization, team and individual developer that wants to modernize or create exciting apps to run on-premises or in the cloud.
Ever since Windows Server 2012 and its capabilities were announced in 2011, the product has generated overwhelming excitement both from early adopter customers, partners, analysts and the press. Let me tell you, it is an amazing product, and far and away the most amazing release of Windows Server we've ever done.Over 200 early deployment program customers have been working closely with the product through our RDP and TAP programs. In addition, over half a million downloads of re-release code were done by a broad audience. And the reaction to the product has been nothing short of spectacular.
2 minutesActive Directory is a collection of services (Server Roles and Features) used to manage identity and access for and to resources on a network.
2 minutesIn the next few slides you will cover each of these Windows Roles with a summary of what each is and what each does.