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Microsoft expects that its customers could use the future versions of Windows Server to manage and provide virtualized applications through the web the way company’s upcoming platform-as-a-service, Windows Azure does it.

“The corporate data center at some point in time will look like a mini-cloud, partitioned by application workload”, said Steven Martin, a senior director for developer platform product management at Microsoft. He added that the innovation in Azure and future versions of Windows Server will be shared, and “that code base will continue to cross-pollinate”.

Windows Azure is the Microsoft’s main weapon to make Windows Server the worlds dominating cloud computing platform. Microsoft promises to web developers to enable them to port or write applications using company’s popular .Net tools and Web standard interfaces such as REST, SOAP and Atom, and host them on Azure, a platform similar to Amazon.com’s EC2, Force.com, or Google’s App Engine. Azure is set to be launched later this year.

Azure To Bring A New Era In Hosting Industry?

Traditional web hosting providers runs their own hardware (rack mountable or desktop alike servers) in data centers, often owned by another company and run a number number of applications on them. This model of web hosting infrastructure is harder to manage and brings a number of set up costs. It is often time consuming to deploy a new hardware and to start new projects on customer’s demand.

All new generation hosting platforms – cloud hosting, clustered hosting systems and grid hosting platform – including the Microsoft’s Azure enable fast deployment and service setup, as well as allow IT businesses to sign up for a scalable web services without facing high upfront costs.

Azure runs on Windows Server 2008 inside Microsoft’s data centers. The company offers both Windows Server software and the Azure service as part of its “software+services” strategy. This might be considered as a plus from that are businesses unsure about committing completely to a cloud infrastructure.

Andy Patrizio, blogger in Internet News published a very interesting article titled “Virtualized Servers: Less Work or More?” that suggests that the data center of the future might be “at least partially virtualized”,. He however says that the consolidation of hardware “does not mean less work”. According to Mr. Patrizio it is clear that a larger virtual data center infrastructure means also more hardware to be maintained.

One of the warnings sent to businesses during a session, part of IDC Directions ’09 conference was that “virtual servers still means more servers to maintain”.

Virtualized Data Centers To Lower Business Costs?

According to Michelle Bailey, a research vice president of IDC’s data center trends and strategies group, the accent on cutting costs is increasing annually. She told the participants of IDC’s Directions Conference 2009 that 40% of IT managers surveyed her company said that cost savings was their top priority.

During the last few months “virtualization” has become one of the most often pronounced spell in all IT markets and in web hosting industry in particular. Companies like Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Parallels, and other   virtualization solution producers swear that by using their virtualization products companies can consolidate low-utilization servers, to increase productivity, and to cut costs for hardware and technology in general. However when it comes to full virtualization techniques, many analysts sya that the average number of Virtual Machines (virtual servers) per physical server is only 5-6.

IDC however says that found that even when businesses move from 5 virtual machines per server to 8, a new 100 million new physical servers still have to be deployed by 2012.

Automation Is A Key To Success

In his opening keynote at Parallels Summit 2009, Serguei Bellousov, the virtualization provider CEO said that automation is one of the most important processes which has to be implemented as much as as possible from any IT company.

IDC says that by 2012 the number of enterprise data centers is going to shrink from 77% to 65% of the total number of data centers. Virtualization technologies and the shift to outsourcing are key factors are pushing for this change.

IDC’s research papers say that the number data centers in which enterprise computing jobs are hosted and outsourced by companies, will grow from 9% to 16%. The smaller data centers that serve local markets and companies, will also grow from 14% to 19% in 2012.

The analysts suggest that companies that build and maintain data centers need to rethink and redesign the concept of running the IT storage facilities. Adding excess capacity should not be the main objective of the data center owners needs.  IDC says that “instead of building a 100,000 square-foot data center and using just 5,000 square feet, build it as a 5,000 square foot modular design, and add on capacity in small, repeatable increments”.

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One of the well-recognized U.S. dedicated hosting providers The Planet announced that it plans to go overseas and to open its first data center in Europe. This would be the first data center operation of the company outside North America. the company claims to face an increasing demands for an international, globally redundant hosted infrastructure. The Planet says its new facility will be build in London area.

”For the past 18 months, we’ve evaluated international markets that are of strategic importance to our planned global expansion, and Europe has been at the forefront of those discussions. We’ve had serious customer interest, which underscored that the time was right to move forward”, said Douglas J. Erwin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at The Planet.

The dedicated hosting provider plans to start offering its proprietary virtual racks solution on UK and EU market in April. The Planet will offer 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. According to hosting provider, its new customers will have access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major EU peering exchanges.

The company has begun building its London based data center two years ago. Recently it added some peering points on the East and West Coasts of the United States. The Planet says that their storage cloud and CDN (Content Delivery Network) products also provide global access points. 42% of the provider’s customers are coming from outside U.S.

The Planet has signed a colocation agreement with TelecityGroup, a company that maintains 20 data centers in 7 EU countries. The web host announced that the procedures in its new facility comply with ISO 9001:2000, a standard that defines requirements for the quality management systems for data center operations.

At the need of the 2009 The Planet said it planed to open its 7th data center in Dallas, a 86,000 square foot collocation facility in Dallas. It is expected to be opened in May 2009.

Microsoft presented Windows Server 2008 with its Hyper-V hypervisor and Microsoft System Center. The world’s leading producer of PC software has outlined its initiatives for the hosting industry on its Microsoft Hosting Summit. The company claims to help web hosting providers to leverage virtualization and to lower their business costs.

One of the key products in Microsoft’s strategy to persuade web hosting providers to use its virtualization technology and its new Windows server is “Dynamic Data Center Toolkit”, which allows for the building and launching of managed services powered by Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

The Microsoft Toolkit holds guidance, sample code, best practices and collateral, that according to Microsoft  help web hosting companies to deploy managed hosting services. The Toolkit also offers step-by-step instructions for building a virtualized, scalable infrastructure.

Microsoft also offers a marketing guidance, that should help  web hosting providers to sell managed hosting services.