- More porn sneaks onto the iPhone
- 'Swatting' case shows need to ban caller-ID spoofing
- Why the iPhone can't be "killed"
- Nortel enterprise chief wants to bring back Bay
- US sets final emergency responder wireless pilot
Microsoft at the end of the month will unveil its "Cloud OS," the secretive Ray Ozzie project that provides a virtual Windows operating system platform for the rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of Internet services and applications.
Microsoft will unveil details later this month at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and show developers the APIs and plumbing services provided by a utility computing platform code-named Red Dog.
In essence, it is an application development and execution platform that lives on the Internet. Red Dog is similar to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google's App Engine, both cloud-based application platforms.
Microsoft also plans to detail the next version of its .Net Framework and improvements to its Web application server that will make it a platform for hosting composite and Web 2.0 applications.
With Red Dog, developers write their applications to take advantage of cloud operating system services much like they do to exploit services on desktop and server operating systems.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told IT managers at a meeting in London last week that the official name and details of something he called "cloud OS" would see their debut at PDC.
Ozzie and his cloud infrastructure services team at Microsoft have quietly been working for the past few years on what has come to be known as the Red Dog project.
The platform, according to Ballmer, will be in simple terms Windows Server for the cloud and will provide such functions as scaling and server management. He told the IT managers the first version will work with Microsoft's data center but future versions could be used in other data centers.
"If you are a developer writing an application on the Microsoft platform, what is new that you will be able to do or to use that you can't do today – those are the questions that should be answered at PDC," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst with the independent research firm Directions on Microsoft.
Ozzie said in July the services platform, as he called it at the time, would provide users with "a new kind of system designed for massive scale-outs, running on large redundant arrays of inexpensive commodity servers in the cloud."
For software on the back end, he said, programs would be spread out across hundreds or even thousands of PCs running in a cloud-based data center that appears like one data center to the programmer but is actually spread around the world.
Partner Content
Explore the Ultrium Edge
The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.
Find Out More
Disk and Tape Square Off
Discover what disk and tape really cost and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization
Download this White Paper
Don't Fall for the Myths
The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.
Review this information
information examination
An examination of information security issues, methods and securing data with LTO-4 tape drive encryption
Read this analysis
Comments (4)
This isnt for you, it is for hosting web applicationsBy Anonymous on November 11, 2008, 11:23 am.
Reply | Read entire comment
Cloud OSBy Anonymous on November 7, 2008, 2:32 pmYou boot the computer to an internet based OS and run you applications in the web browser. You files can be saved online OR on your local hard drive. Adobe has an...
Reply | Read entire comment
Cloud OSBy Anonymous on November 5, 2008, 4:49 amI do not know one person who would be prepared to allow their data to be stored in this way. There are great concerns about security, and what do you do if you cannot...
Reply | Read entire comment
I'd rather have my data and software on my hard drive where it's safeBy Anonymous on October 27, 2008, 2:12 amI'd rather have my data and software on my hard drive where it's safe and easy for me to get at, not in cyberspace where anyone could see, copy or destroy, I will...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments