Transforming IT Into a Strategic Asset Through Core Infrastructure

While at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, we visited a wide variety of interesting sessions. In this blog post, we will focus on a session of particular interest to readers of IT’s About Uptime - Transforming IT into a Strategic Asset through Core Infrastructure led by the General Manager of Infrastructure Servers at Microsoft, Larry Orecklin.

Larry began with an overview of the current state of the core infrastructure market. Larry set up his talk by reminding us all that Core Infrastructure has always been important to IT, but often not viewed as a sexy part of the IT organization.

He also reviewed the primary dynamics Microsoft is currently seeing in the marketplace.

• Hardware Shifts
• Virtualization
• Extreme Mobility
• Green IT

Microsoft has released a large number of core infrastructure products over the last year. Larry did a quick review…

• In February Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008. Since then, they have trained over 500,000 customers on these solutions. To give a sense of adoption rates, Windows Server 2008 is 12% ahead of launch of Windows Server 2003. The core infrastructure team is focused on broad adoption in marketplace, and Larry claims that Windows Server is gaining share with Web and High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads gaining share (for example growth of 300% in HPC over the last 12 months)

• Hyper-V was released to market in the last couple weeks, with 1.2 million downloads of Hyper-V to date

• Microsoft also expanded their Management portfolio including System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft has also sold over 7 million seats of Application Virtualization, which Larry states is the fastest growth in Microsoft volume license history.

Next Larry introduced Microsoft’s vision of Dynamic IT, focused on four key items that guide Microsoft investment. Dynamic IT is viewed as multi-year (10+ years) vision that the Microsoft team is 3-4 years into, including a focus on:

• Manage Complexity and Achieve Agility
• Protect Information, Control Access
• Advance the business with IT Solutions
• Amplify the Impact of your People

Larry introduced Microsoft’s Infrastructure Optimization model. It seems very familiary to the wide variety of maturity models out there, with the following components:

• Basic – IT is a cost center
• Standardized – IT is an efficient cost center
• Rationalized – IT is a business enabler
• Dynamic – IT is a strategic asset

Microsoft is focusing on four key areas of investment:

• Management
• Identity and Security
• Integrated Virtualization
• Operating Systems

Operating Systems – here the focus is on targeting specific segments and specific types of workloads (remote offices, small business, high performance computing, web).

Integrated Virtualization – Microsoft thinks about virtualization as an integrated approach, looking at server virtualization, desktop virtualization, application virtualization and presentation virtualization. Larry reviewed the products Microsoft offers in this area.

Management – Larry focused on Microsoft System Center. In particular, he highlighted the focus Microsoft has on providing a single pane of glass to help manage the datacenter, for a wide variety of vendor products, including management extensions for unix and linux as well as upcoming support for virtualization management for VMWare and other virtualization vendors. The Microsoft goal here seems to be to provide end-to-end physical and virtual management, using Microsoft tools.

Takeaways:

From sitting in this session, my takeaway is that Microsoft is serious about competing in the datacenter and working to engage with the needs of IT operations professionals. As we have seen in our research, Microsoft already has strong presence in the software infrastructure stack.

At the end of the session, Larry mentioned that Microsoft is announcing this week $75 million dollars in additional core infrastructure investment. We will be hearing more….

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Filed Under: IT Operations, Virtualization