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Azure: Live in Australia from April |
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| 2/23/2010 3:05:41 AM | |
Microsoft has announced that it will offer Australian customers access to its Azure cloud computing services from April. The services include compute, storage and database services on demand and will be hosted in data centers in the area of Singapore and Hong Kong. The services will be launched through different pricing models. The primary and most apparent is a 'consumption model', through which the subscribers pay per use on a monthly bill. Microsoft has advertised compute-on-demand for US$0.12 cents per hour and storage-on-demand at US$0.15c per gigabyte per month (and US$0.10 per 10,000 storage transactions). The customers can also use SQL database on demand, with the web edition (relational database of up to 1 GB) offered at US$9.99 per month and a business edition (relational database of up to 10GB) at US$99.99 per month. Customers are charged additional pay-as-you-go fees for Access Control (US$1.99 per 100,000 connections) and Service Bus Connections. The customers in Asia and Australia would pay out equivalent rates as paid by Americans, but will have to pay three times for data transfers. Microsoft will also offer 'subscription' model, which provides discounts for customers committing to longer-term contracts. This model is quite similar to the payment predictability and discounts mobile carriers that offer their subscribers over the monthly contracts of 12 and 24 months. Microsoft has also promised additional special pricing for customers holding Volume Licensing or Enterprise Agreements with Microsoft but as such, any details were not disclosed. Users can try out 25 hours of compute, 500GB of storage and 10,000 storage transactions for free until the end of July, with a SQL web edition database and 500MB of inbound and outbound traffic thrown in. MSDN Premium subscribers are offered a better introductory package, which has 8 months of free access to 750 hours of compute, 10GB of storage, one million storage transactions, three web edition SQL databases and 2.5GB of inbound traffic and 5GB of outbound. The vendor is also offering a fixed 6 months introductory special, under its 'Development Accelerator' program. Meanwhile, Microsoft channel partners have access to 5% discounts. Microsoft's Azure pricing for compute-on-demand is competitive with Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), but the customers wishing for scaling to huge data sets may find Amazon's sliding scale more attractive. Microsoft has offered free uploads to its data centers during "off peak" seasons, until June 30. As a counter to this offer, Amazon has free uploads throughout 24/7, until June 30. Amazon gives virtual machines on-demand with total control, which is essential for some applications. Windows Azure gives you no control and actually, for some applications you do not require this control. Admin skills are needed on Amazon. With Azure, you do not need Admins for taking up all the work. Microsoft is also offering service level agreements of between 99.5-99.9 percent uptime for its compute, instance monitoring, storage and database availability, as well as for its service bus and access control. The vendor will give any customer a credit of between 10-25% on their next bill should it fail to meet one of these service levels. Microsoft also announced that a swathe of Australian customers have already trialed the service. Many customers want to start on-premise applications and then move towards the cloud. There is some privacy or regulatory scenarios, in which clouds do not make sense. The traditional hosting partners, which should not be concerned about Azure. Nothing is going to change in the short term. Azure is an additional tool at your disposal and it is not a replacement proposition, but actually a complementary proposition, which may require some workloads, which will move towards cloud. Tag Clouds: personal hosting, personal web hosting, personal website hosting, web hosting, Free Web Hosting, Unlimited Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, VPS Web Hosting, free website templates, Web Hosting news, Web hosting FAQ, Web Hosting Tutorials, Web Hosting Glossary, SEO TOOLS |
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