Microsoft's 'Azure in a box' brings cloud on-premise

Microsoft has partnered with Dell for on a hybrid cloud appliance that it claims gives it an edge over pure public cloud rivals Google and Amazon Web Services.

The Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) appliance is pre-integrated with Dell hardware and Window Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Windows Azure Pack to let customers and partners install an Azure environment on-premise.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president of Cloud and Enterprise said: "It delivers a consistent Azure based management portal, consistent management set of APIs – the same as we have in our public cloud – the same hypervisor and many of the same core features that Azure delivers as well, including our IaaS and web-based application services.

"It basically enables enterprises to step into the cloud with even greater control and build solutions that will work not only in their data centres but in ours as well," added Guthrie.

Customers can deploy CPS in "increments from one to four racks", according to a blog from the Microsoft Windows Server Team.

Each rack has 512 cores across 32 servers (each with a dual socket Intel Ivy Bridge, E5-2650v2 CPU), 8TB of RAM with 256GB per server, 282 TB of usable storage, 1360 Gb/s of internal rack connectivity, 560 Gb/s of inter-rack connectivity and up to 60 Gb/s connectivity to the external world.

The team aimed to build a resilient system that hit a "sweet spot" between cost and performance.

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

CPS comes pre-integrated with anti-virus, fabric-based backup for all virtual machines, disaster recovery, orchestrated patching, monitoring, a self-service portal, REST-based API for programmatic interaction and automation using PowerShell. The team claimed it would require no further investments to create "a complete cloud solution".

This "Azure-consistent cloud in a box" was announced at a briefing in San Francisco, where Microsoft also revealed that enterprise analytics and data management firm Cloudera is now Azure-certified, and that container-based Linux operating system CoreOS is available on Azure.

It is not Microsoft's first foray into the on-premise hardware space; it has been dabbling in infrastructure through its StorSimple brand.