Microsoft invests in cloud

Anticipating rapid growth in public and private clouds, Microsoft has dedicated 30 000 engineers to Azure, Bing, and online versions of Office 2010 and Live, states InformationWeek.

Doug Hauger, GM of Windows Azure, says: “Microsoft has made deep investments in infrastructure. We've spent $2 billion on cloud infrastructure bringing in tens of thousands of commodity servers.”

The tech giant is building six large data centres around the world to support its Bing search engine and other cloud initiatives. One outside Chicago has been built to hold 300 000 servers, although it remains short of that mark to date.

Server sales related to cloud computing are expected to jump to $12.6 billion in the next five years, as more businesses embrace the era of automated and virtualised data centres, reports Market Watch.

Server revenue for public cloud computing is projected to grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014, according to the IDC.

Meanwhile server revenue for private cloud computing is expected to grow from $7.3 billion to $11.8 billion in the same period.

Dell is combining its server and storage solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as an answer to solve large scale data centre and data management challenges, says eWeek.

Dell is touting support for SQL Server 2008 R2 on its line of 64-bit PowerEdge servers as well as PowerVault, EqualLogic and Dell/EMC storage solutions as a way to increase scalability for large application workloads and to improve consolidation implementations.

The company says this will provide a single point of contact to reduce risk, costs and time associated with managing a database environment.