who owns the data?

If it's on Microsoft's cloud then, from a legal standpoint, they own it. Consult a lawyer for your jurisdiction for details.

Somehow, I don't find that attractive at all.

Yep

Microsoft would never ask for a three year agreement for anything of theirs for the same reason, I'm sure.

Dear Oracle customer

Before you sign that 3 year ELA or ULA you should talk to IBM about Power systems.

Power7 delivers incredible value for your software investment and can help you dramatically decrease your maintenance fee's with Oracle. Power's virtualization and performance is unmatched in the industry with 8 years of wide spread acceptance.

Ideally you should be working towards reducing your Oracle costs a year before the license renewal. We have reduced our core counts every year since we moved to Power from SPARC and keep getting more value out of the software licenses we bought years ago. Past waste of 10% utilized licenses has enabled us to not have to buy any new "capacity" licenses in years.

Works for us....we laughed at the Oracle rep when she tried to sell us Exadata with all new license required.

(Hi Matt B)

Allison

Hilarious

Microsoft warning about vendor lock-in.

What they mean is probably that their lock-in is way better than VMWare's

Ha!

Apps you can trust????

M$, i have one word for you:

Vista.

Power? Really?

@Allison: Industry Standard Architectures are less of a trap than sole-vendor platforms. This has always been the case. There is no more valid argument for IBM Power except for the use case that it deliveres a required performance or feature that can't otherwise be had - itself a concession to the monopoly trap that surrenders your free will to get your solution. That's almost always a bad plan.

@article: Microsoft can say whatever it wants in the press, couched in the fungible terms they always use. For Microsoft the "cloud" is the ambiguity of their marketing. Read the license terms carefully and try to get that past legal before you buy the product. You'll find there is no way to legally deploy Hyper-V in an HA environment where you need to fail over and fail back on demand. It's a non-starter.

What counts in the cloud is that your cloud virtual servers are always arranged in redundant clusters for failover and scalability. It helps if they can be migrated from one virtual platform to another. The hypervisor is only relevant in that it needs to permit the required operations with its licensing, it must report performance metrics and provide management. That's all.

cloud computing

hum not my thing thanks il pass il keep it where i know its safe

Bet there's an App for that...

... and so there is: http://bit.ly/RLv8

compulsory 3-year commitment?

Lets' see....... mmm ... oh yeah, Microsoft Software Assurance.

Did I get it right?

Also, about vendor and trust, who is shoving the puky office 2007/10 ribbon down our throats, at our training and time-wasted cost, without consultation, just because they decided it is good for us?

Sheesh, some cheek !