Microsoft is reviving efforts to bring Azure down into the data center with an upcoming line of pre-configured appliances codenamed “San Diego”, Redmond news veteran Mary Jo Foley cited anonymous insiders as saying in a fresh report. If true, the software giant’s latest shot at entering the private cloud race marks one of CEO Satya Nadella’s boldest enterprise pushes since taking office, and holds potentially massive ramifications for the industry as a whole.

Microsoft’s first attempt to join in on the enterprise stack wars was all the way back in mid-2010, when it pulled the curtains back on a reference design for a monolithic system packing anywhere between hundreds and thousands of servers running an on-premise version of its platform-as-a-service offering. The mammoth machine was supposed to be made available through big-name hardware partners such as Dell and HP, but never made it onto the production line and reportedly met its anti-climatic demise three years later following a fair amount of internal wrangling.

Under Nadella, the Azure appliance seems to be back with vengeance. Foley’s unnamed tipsters indicate that the new series will include pre-assembled server racks like its predecessor but incorporate storage and networking equipment as well, which suggests Microsoft is following its newest partner, cloud-in-a-box rising star Nutanix, down the convergence road.

The appliance is supposedly based on the Azure Pack for Windows Server, which has been available at no charge to users of the operating system for quite some time and makes it possible to deploy and deliver a handful of the platform’s core capabilities in-house. Foley further claims  that the line will incorporate Microsoft’s Storage Spaces technology, a homegrown capacity virtualization function integrated into Windows Server 2012 R2, and come with optional clustering features.

The last and perhaps most interesting tidbit, other than the very existence of the project, is that the firm apparently intends to offer up the appliances and support directly instead of going through the channel. That suggests the company may be gearing up to pull the same stunt it did with the Surface, driving hardware growth at the expense of partner sales. How much of that revenue it will siphon away, however, still remains to be seen.

Market implications

If something ever comes of it, San Diego could have a tremendous impact on the  balance of power in the modern data center. The dominant private cloud platform is currently OpenStack, which is showing great  promise and boasts a number of high-profile users but, according to some, lacks the leadership and cohesiveness needed to enter the enterprise mainstream.

An on-premise edition of Azure wouldn’t suffer from that problem. The platform would also have the more than theoretical advantage of being interoperable with public cloud deployments, although it wouldn’t provide the flexibility afforded by the open-source nature of OpenStack. Whether that’s a worthy trade-off is an important question for many CIOs.

The rumor raises another, equally significant point: what’s to stop  rivals Amazon and Google from following in the footsteps of Microsoft and take the fight to the data center? Seeing that many of the traditional vendors in their sights are cultivating a public cloud presence as part of their hybrid computing roadmaps, moving down the same route from the opposite direction might almost seem to make just as much sense.

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