By Chris Mellor
Microsoft’s Azure storage offering suggests it is developing its own cloud storage operating system. Azure was developed in a Windows Azure Group which was separate from the Windows and Servers Group. The two organisations have now been combined into a new Servers and Cloud Division (SCD) unit, headed up by a senior VP, Amitabh Srivastava. SCD itself is part of Bob Muglia’s Servers and Tools Business unit.
The Azure cloud service, based on Microsoft’s own data centres, is dependent on virtualised server instances, child partitions in Hyper-V-speak, using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Users will access these in a public cloud across the Internet and set up virtual server applications. These applications will access storage that provides three kinds of data store: Blobs, tables and queues.
