Delivering the power of the Windows Azure Platform to your datacenter.

Windows Azure™ platform appliance is a turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy in their own datacenter, across hundreds to thousands of servers. The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. This hardware will be delivered by a variety of partners.

The appliance is designed for service providers, large enterprises and governments and provides a proven cloud platform that delivers breakthrough datacenter efficiency through innovative power, cooling and automation technologies.

Use Windows Azure Platform Appliance to:

  • Offer scale-out applications, platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service in your own datacenter.
  • Deploy a proven cloud platform that can scale to tens of thousands of servers.
  • Leverage the benefits of the Windows Azure platform in your own datacenter while maintaining physical control, data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.

Windows Azure Platform Appliance Benefits

Efficiency and Agility:
  • Datacenter efficiency – proven to run at low cost of operations across hundreds and thousands of servers with a small ratio of IT operators to servers and efficient power, cooling and server utilization.
  • Massive Scale – ability to scale from hundreds to tens-of-thousands of servers.
  • Elasticity – ability to scale up and down from one to thousands of application instances depending on demand.
  • Integration – with existing datacenter tools and operations
  • Optimized for multi-tenancy – designed for multi-tenancy across business units or organizations.
  • Optimized for service availability – Designed for service availability via fault tolerance and self-healing capabilities
Simplicity:

Partners and customers can utilize their existing development skills in familiar languages such as .NET and PHP to create and manage web applications and services,. Optimized for scale-out applications-designed so that developers can easily build scale-out applications using their existing application platforms and development tools.

Trustworthy:

Partners and customers will receive enterprise class service backed by reliable service level agreements and deep online services experience.

 

Read more http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/appliance/