Along with partners HP, Dell, and Fujitsu, Microsoft is offering private installations of Windows Azure. The product will be offered in appliance format, meaning Microsoft will be selling the hardware and software as a bundle. While no pricing is set, the target audience is customers like eBay who can afford at least one thousand servers.
Steve Marx of Microsoft is stressing that companies will not be able to customization their Azure installations. The hardware and software stack will essentially be a black box, which will allow Microsoft’s partners to offer exactly the same features and APIs that the public cloud offers and will receive the same patches and updates. The goal is to offer a consistent development experience for programmers and make migrating from one installation to another seamless.
Customers needing less than a thousand servers are being directed to either Microsoft’s current Azure offering or, if they want an on-site data center, Microsoft’s line of Hyper-V virtual machine servers.