Microsoft too has launched its own platform and set of tools for developers to start writing for the cloud and provides new options for ISVs that didn’t exist a year ago.

This month we take a look at several companies that are bringing new weapons to the cloud computing battle and try to examine whether they make sense for most developers, VARs and customers. It’s still a mixed bag of functionality and complexity, and in the end we’re left waiting for continued improvement throughout the cloud. But we can point to several companies, technologies and solutions as reasons for optimism.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure

Microsoft’s flagship cloud product isn’t a product, it’s a service targeted at its development community. What’s great about Windows Azure is also its biggest drawback: It is integrated so tightly into Microsoft’s existing Windows ecosystem that for those schooled in Visual Basic and .Net, it should be an absolute breeze. But some would say that also means there’s a catch.

Microsoft saw its ascension to the top of the industry in the ‘80s and early to mid ‘90s when it made it simple and profitable for ISVs to build applications for its Windows platform. When moving up the chain to network and Internet-based computing, Microsoft moved its model to the .Net platform and continued to grow. Now, with the advent of cloud computing, Microsoft brings us Windows Azure.

Built on the foundation of Visual Basic and .Net, Red Hat executives, among others, say Microsoft has built this with a Windows lock-in for developers. To a large degree, that criticism is correct. For something as simple as integrating the Windows Azure development into your environment, Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio requires .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and either Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1 or Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition. To simply access the tools and infrastructure, we needed to install everything on an instance of Windows Server 2008. To our way of thinking, that’s a lock-in. But not everybody minds a lock-in. Some would say Apple’s strategy surrounding iPhone and iPad is to build a lock-in, and that hasn’t hurt Apple. And in previous computing eras, lock-in certainly hasn’t hurt Microsoft in a noticeable way.

So you’ve met the requirements to install the Azure tools, you’re familiar with Microsoft’s Visual Basic-based programming environment and you want to build cloud-based applications. Azure isn’t free. Under an SLA, users can pay 12 cents an hour for compute cloud infrastructure, 15 cents per GB stored per month, 1 cent per 10,000 storage transactions, among other costs. Microsoft isn’t charging for inbound data transfers during off-peak times through June 30. While not free, the cost is competitive with other cloud computing or cloud storage services.

Microsoft’s top executives have made it clear to channel partners that every, single, solitary part of its product lineup—from Windows to SQL Server—will be ported over to the cloud, which means that it’s going to have to take its development community with it, or try. Azure is a robust platform for those sticking with Microsoft environments and will be a big part of its future.

EMC Atmos

EMC, one of the industry’s pioneers in virtualization and an emerging leader in cloud computing, had appeared tentative for a while in rolling out its new cloud computing platform. Atmos, its hosted storage offering, launched last year but EMC was relatively quiet about it. That is, until last month. Then, EMC made an announcement: It would work to give a boost to its Atmos cloud infrastructure platform by adding data protection technology, which it calls GeoProtect, as well as upgrading its entire hosting infrastructure to servers running Intel Xeon 5500 chips.

The Xeon 5500s are, simply, the most powerful processors we’ve ever seen in the CRN Test Center lab. Last year, in one instance, we were able to take a dual-Xeon server, two 5570 CPUs, and install Windows Server 2008 R2 and 20 functioning virtual servers in about an hour. In a server the size of two pizza boxes, we were able to build a stable, virtual data center in no time.

The system itself registered a Geekbench score of almost 15,000. Even though this happened a year ago, that’s still the highest system score we’ve ever seen.

When one of the biggest players in the industry adopts the most powerful hardware standard for one of its most critical, emerging lines of business, it makes a statement. Hardware still counts. EMC could have just said it would upgrade its data center and left it at that. But by going public with the details, EMC was making a statement and challenging the rest of the industry to do the same.

Amazon Web Services (S3, Simple Storage Service)

When we last examined Amazon.com’s cloud offerings a year ago, we found its EC2 elastic cloud to be a turnkey-simple, pay-as-you go, Web-based hosted server solution.

A lot has happened since then: Competition has increased; cloud companies have built out a lot more infrastructure and more enterprises than ever are open to giving it a try. But Amazon fueled perhaps the biggest alteration to the cloud market when it decided to slash pricing dramatically over the past several months with its Amazon Simple Storage Service.

Enterprise cloud storage is the most crowded portion of the hosted IT space, it’s the easiest place to find value (EMC, Rackspace and Data Deposit Box all offer laudable solutions here), and reliability and availability are making some improvement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now provides software development kits for Java and .Net, including libraries, sample code and APIs, meaning it provides a platform for application development and deployment. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), essentially, sets the industry standard for cloud-based storage and backup.

Integrated well into the AWS fabric, Amazon.com’s Amazon CloudFront, for example, provides the ability to import, export or access data stored on its cloud in a matter of a few clicks. It offers the option to have data distributed via download or streaming, allocate elastic IP addresses, make snapshots, create security groups and load balancers, and bundle tasks.

As it provides greater levels of management, customization, security and accessibility, Amazon’s approach also offers greater levels of complexity. For example, the process of creating buckets” to hold objects on Amazon’s cloud requires an amount of coding and line commands that other services don’t require for
baseline service.

For many enterprises just beginning to migrate to a cloud-based model for data storage and backup, Amazon may be a natural choice to evaluate, and it offers good pricing once you pass the petabyte-level of data required for storage. However, for those that want to make the move to a cloud-based model a little easier, other solutions such as Rackspace or Data Deposit Box may be a wiser alternative.

The bottom line

What all of these solutions prove is that there is no, single cookie-cutter approach to enterprise cloud IT—at least not yet. For VARs, there remains the very real possibility of delivering a client too much or not enough compute capability or storage capacity, or too much or not enough headroom. For now, then, best practices will include a full audit of an enterprise’s data usage, compliance requirements, business road map and budget. Most enterprises are taking a slower approach to migrating data and compute resources to the cloud, and for good reason. There is a wide gulf between simple storage and backup and robust application development and delivery to and from the cloud.

While companies like Microsoft and Amazon.com provide resources and infrastructure for longer-term and more robust cloud solutions—and it will take time for developers and technology providers to get there—EMC provides half-steps that we can clearly recommend.