Microsoft New Server Design Aims at Speeding Cloud Setup

Microsoft is offering up a new server design that it hopes will influence the rest of the data-center industry, according to Bloomberg. That is a move that keeps pressure on hardware vendors like Hewlett Packard to lower the price of cloud infrastructure. An earlier design by Microsoft now accounts for 90 percent of the company's data center server purchases, underscoring just how far it has moved in favor of its own specifications, often manufactured by commodity server vendors.

The new design will be submitted to the open source Open Compute Project for others to work on and use, while Microsoft itself plans to deploy it in data centers by the middle of next year, said Kushagra Vaid, a Microsoft general manager for the group that engineers the company's cloud hardware. It's intended to enable companies to deploy a wide variety of applications and can use different international power standards without having to alter the hardware, he said.

The goal is to ease cloud deployments, as well as collaboration on these kinds of open source projects. Microsoft is unveiling the design at an earlier stage than previous Open Compute projects to enable many parties to cooperate on it. The public nature opens the process up to commodity server makers, as well as brands like Hewlett Packard and Dell Technologies Inc., intensifying margin and market share pressure on those companies as many cloud operators forego brand-name hardware.