That Microsoft has been aggressively investing Cloud Computing is old news: Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has long pronounced, "We are all in the Cloud." Now, we are beginning to see aggressive execution as can only be expected from Microsoft. In addition to its announcement of Azure's public IaaS and PaaS offerings back in January 2010, Microsoft also publicized that it is now making a foray into private clouds with the first iteration of the "Azure-in-a-box"—which is targeted towards large companies—at last week's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington D.C. Microsoft also announced partnerships with selected hardware vendors, including HP, Dell, and Fujitsu, who will sell the Azure appliance. However, Microsoft did not announce a date for its general availability. The Azure appliance website states: "The appliance is currently in limited production release to a small set of customers and partners. We will develop our roadmap depending on what we learn from this set of customers and partners. We have no additional details to share at this time."

Microsoft's Azure appliance lets companies concerned with security and privacy keep their software and data within their data centers while gaining the benefits of cloud scale, elasticity, self-service, and resource pooling.

This is a smart move on Microsoft's part, a move in line with and validated by our recent research that private and hybrid clouds showed the greatest increase in customer (particularly larger enterprises) adoption over the next three years.

"It's very apparent to us on a global basis that the public cloud is nice and achievable, but a private cloud is an absolutely necessary step for enterprise-class customers," said Marc Silvester, senior vice president and global technology officer of Fujitsu, which provides IT services.

Our research also showed that SMB companies were adopting public clouds more rapidly than large enterprises and are actually moving mission-critical applications twice as fast to the external cloud. Although Microsoft and many of its VARs expressed an interest in an SMB version of the appliance, it remains to be seen if there is really a market for it; many SMB's are rapidly reducing their data center footprints and are accelerating their move to the public cloud. The economics (of the public cloud) are too compelling to ignore for cash-strapped small companies and start-ups.

On Azure-related news, last week, Infor announced the launch of Infor24, which essentially delivers Cloud versions of its business solution software on the Microsoft's Azure platform. This is a huge win for Microsoft and Azure! The fact that a major ISV such as Infor is betting on the Microsoft Cloud stack shows the promise and future of the Azure Platform and PaaS. Welcome to big-time Enterprise ERP in the cloud!

Although relatively new to the PaaS market, Microsoft's primary advantage is that it has a vast pool of developers, ISVs, and system integrators familiar with Microsoft technologies and it's not a huge leap for them to move into the Microsoft Cloud. It certainly helps Microsoft's case that it supports Java in addition to all the .Net frameworks and languages out there.

Needless to say, Microsoft is playing to win in the Cloud.

Read More:

• Infor to embrace Microsoft's Azure Cloud
• Windows Azure Platform Appliance
• Microsoft unveils "Azure-in-a-Box"

In many ways, the virtual server has become the basic foundational unit on top of which cloud elasticity, automated scaling, and resource pooling capabilities are being built. The new vSphere 4.1 announcement by VMware not only cements the company's position as the virtualization leader but also signals its strategy to lead organizations down the path of private and public clouds using its technologies as the foundation.

It is not lost on VMware, however, that the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer of the cloud stack will eventually mature to a point where applications will be completely agnostic to the underlying virtualization layer. Notwithstanding the danger of cannibalizing its own virtualization business, VMware has made bold moves recently into the PaaS direction with the acquisition of SpringSource and the partnership with SalesForce. The upper layers of the cloud stack hold the key to higher margins and the companies that capture that market will become the leaders of cloud computing in the next decade. However, we believe there is still room for virtualization to continue to rule the roost for several years to come in the form of private and hybrid cloud implementations, but it will increasingly be a commoditization play. VMware will need to acquire and/or partner with new companies, technologies, and expertise to stay relevant and profitable in the new era of cloud computing.

All that said, VMware is clearly moving in the right direction.

Read More:

• VMware Advances Foundation for Cloud Computing With VMware vSphere 4.1 and Expanded Virtualization Management Portfolio
• Virtualization Crown
• VMware Knows the Cloud Doesn't Need Server Virtualization

High Performance Applications (HPC) require high compute performance and high I/O bandwidth to process massive amounts of data using parallel processes and high-performance messaging protocols such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) for tightly-coupled inter process communication. Amazon has introduced HPC with its EC2 Cluster Compute instance type: The EC2 Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large has the following specifications:

• 23 GB of memory
• 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core "Nehalem" architecture)
• 1690 GB of instance storage
• 64-bit platform
• I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
• API name: cc1.4xlarge

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Software and Programming Group developed Integrated Performance Monitoring (IPM) software to measure how well scientific applications perform on these HPC systems. To test the HPC performance of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, the Berkeley Lab team applied these same tools to the Amazon's new offering. "When we applied these tests to the new Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, we found that the new offering performed 8.5 times faster than the previous Amazon instance types," said Jackson, who led the Berkeley Lab portion of the collaboration.

Read More:

• Amazon announces EC2 support for HPC applications
• Berkeley Lab Contributes Expertise to New Amazon HPC Cloud Offering
• Is Amazon killing Grid Computing?

Rackspace announced an Open Source Platform called OpenStack™ designed to foster the emergence of cloud interoperability standards. This is a major disruptive move by an important cloud company and could lead to more innovation and flexibility for the industry as well the as the end users. Most cloud vendors today use open stacks technologies behind the scenes but they lock customers into their proprietary platform and API, thus making it very difficult for customers to migrate and/or interoperate with other cloud vendors. With OpenStack™, Rackspace is changing this equation radically by inviting their customers, partners, and even competitors to collaborate and improve the OpenStack™ technologies.

Read More:

• Rackspace Launches Open-Source Cloud Platform OpenStack™
• Rackspace opens the cloud with OpenStack™
• OpenStack™- Advancing Cloud Computing in the Open