News

posted on 24 July 2008 08:24

Microsoft is developing a cloud infrastructure offering storage and other services called Red Dog according to blogged information.

Red Dog is a cloud infrastructure service being developed in Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team. A version 1 release is expected for early adopter ISV customers this year. The Red Dog platform is an efficient, fully automated and virtualized environment which includes a set of highly scalable storage services. Red Dog is capable of scaling to millions of machines. A job ad said Red Dog should lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications.

An April, 2008 job advert, now no longer available, said: "The Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team is responsible for creating the Microsoft Utility Computing Platform, also known by its early codename Red Dog (RD). This platform is one of the lowest levels of the services software/hardware stack and includes an efficient, virtualized computational substrate, a fully automated service management system and a comprehensive set of highly scalable storage services."

"The platform will enable services to scale to millions of machines distributed globally throughout Microsoft data centers. Further, it will provide the lowest operating costs per-node, and will lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications. CIS is a young and hungry team that is on the path to delivering a V1 product to external customers in the coming year."

This looks like an Google App Engine and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) ECC (Elastic Compute Cloud) sort of thing.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}