Windows Azure Stack–What about the infrastructure Story?

There is no denying that Microsoft Azure is a success story, from being the lame silverlight portal with limited capabilities that it was to become a global force to be reckoned with in the cloud marketspace.

Later today Microsoft is releasing their first tech preview of their Azure Stack. Which allow us to bring the power of Azure platform to our pwn datacenters. It brings the same consistent UI and feature set of Azure resource manager which allows us to use the same tools and resource we have used in Azure against our own local cloud.

This of course will allow large customers and hosting providers to deliver Azure platform from their own datacenter. The idea seems pretty good thou. But what is actually Azure Stack ? It only deliver half of the promise of a Cloud like infrastructure. So I would place Azure stack within the category of cloud management platform. Since it is giving us the framework and portal experience

Now when we eventually have this setup and configured, we are given some of the benefits of the cloud which are

• Automation
• Self-Service
• A common framework and platform to work with

Now if we look at the picture above there are some important things we need to think about in terms of fitting within the cloud aspect which is the computer fabric / network fabric and storage fabric which is missing from the Microsoft story. Of course Microsoft is a software company, but they are moving forward with their CPS solution with Dell and moving a bit towards the hardware space, but no where close yet.

When I think about Azure I also think about the resources which are beneath, they are always available, non-silo based and can scale up and down as I need to. Now if we think about the way that Microsoft has built their own datacenters there are no SAN archietecture at all, just a bunch of single machines with local storage with using software as the way to connect all this storage and compute into a large pool of resources, which is the way it should be since the SAN architecture just cannot fit into a full cloud solution. This is also the way it should be for an on-premises solution. If we were to deploy a Azure CloudStack to deliver the benefits of a cloud solution, the infrastructure should reflect that. As of right now Microsoft cannot give a good enough storage/compute solution with Storage Spaces in 2012 R2 since there are limits to the scale, and points of failure which a public cloud does not have.

Now Nutanix are one of the few providers which deliver support for Hyper-V and SMB 3.0 and does not have any scale limits and have the same properties as a public cloud solution. It agreegates all storage on local drives within each node into a pool of storage and with redundancy in all layers including an REST API which can easily integrate into Azure Stack, I can easily see that as the best way to deliver an on-premises cloud solution and a killer-combination.