After spending some quality time with my fellow collegaues from Crayon, we went to the Keynote.
Speaker was Brad Anderson, General Manager for Management & Services Divison. The topic for the presentation was dynamic it, described as the key for efficiencies and innovation. Hi went on thank the audience for doing such an important job. And continued the IT-Hero theme that Microsoft has used since the launch of Windows Server 2008.
Then we were talking about IT Priorities, and how those have changed. The priorities listed this time was:
Green IT, Virtualization,Cloud Services,Anywhere access,Business Intelligence,Compliance
How to balance your needs around new capabilities versus cost was also touched, stateing that todays financial crisis might make cost even more important than it have been soo far.
This naturaly led to talking about how dynamic IT could make IT less a cost center, and more an strategic asset for the company.
So then we started to talk about virtualization and the offerings from Microsoft. Ofcourse, Hyper-V was the main topic along with Virtual Machine Manager. Brad identified this as the greatest opportunity to drive down cost, both with respect to server utilization as well as power consumption. He also told about the experiences with moving Microsoft.com to Hyper-V, and the result of better utilization and power consumption.
Alan Goodman gave a demo of Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager. He used Windows Server 2008 R2 edition, and showed Live Migration, and PRO features for dynamic allocation host servers. As Windows Server 2008 R2 is in M3 (Milestone 3) release it's quite impressive to see how much is really there.
Rounding up the talk about virtualization Brad showed a comparision between Hyper-V / Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and VmWare. The price example showed that VmWare was three times the price of Microsoft. But even more interesting was the feature comparsion for management. This showed that Microsoft actually had more features for management - doing multi hypervisior management, Application Management and physical management.
The story continued to focus on System Center Operation Manager 2007 R2 version. Brad told us that Microsoft is the largest buyer of servers in the world, and that they build datacenters for the future. I think this shows that Microsoft nows where the management issues are, and that they feel pains and know what the market needs. There was no doubt in my mind that System Center Operation Manager 2007 R2 really gets it. Now also with support for other platforms than Microsoft, thru Cross plattform extensions based on WS-Management. It's also exciting to hear them talk about codename Oslo. But for today I think they did an important announcement about Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 SP2. SP2 og IAG is an Virtual Machine that you buy and use! No need for hardware- you run it virtual :)
As the keynote was progressing we changed to see some of the new improvments in SQL Server Kilimanjaro. We were showed how easy self-service analysis will be through use of codename Gemini - a product were they showed analyzing more than 100 million rows. And the speed was impressive - thinking about the amount of data that was processed. It¨s no doubt that Microsoft is going to make things easier for the knowledge workers out there working with analysis and reporting.
Ofcourse a Microsoft keynote today needs to talk about Software+Services. And Brad, as all the other executives from Microsoft, says its about CHOICE. Giving the customer the choice between on-premise, partner hosted or Microsoft hosted. I find this interesting, and I do think that today Software+Service is what we need - much more that only one or the other. This was followed up by an demo of Microsoft Online Services, and more specific Exchange Online. They showed how easy it was to synchronize your on-premise Active Directory with the cloud.
And everything was wrapped up with an overview of Azure Servies Platform. Giving us an idea about the direction Microsoft is going with cloud computing.
I think the topics were very interesting for ITPro, and I think Microsoft shows us a very interesting future for Microsoft users :)
I also attended at session with Steve Riley, and a session about networking improvments in Windows Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7. Stay tuned for more posts :)