Since launching Windows Azure cloud services internationally, Microsoft had said that their spreadsheet of datacentre costs didn’t make sense for an Australian offering. Well apparently the 2013 version of excel calculations come back differently. A massive announcement from Microsoft today, that two new Azure locations, New South Wales and Victoria are being added to available locations in Asia, Europe and America.
Local datacentres are a big deal, despite there being any law preventing data from being hosted off-shore, many companies and government departments implement business policies to enforce that. Previously this provided scope for new hosting and cloud service providers like Ninefold to gain traction. It seems that traction caught the eye of Redmond and they could no longer deny Australian business local servers.
Customers can get started now by using virtual machines to build test and development environments that give developers a platform to innovate at a faster speed, and by migrating .NET and Open Source applications, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory onto virtual machines in Windows Azure. When the new region is fully operational, our teams will be here to help you migrate your applications, virtual machines and services.
You can see the current server locations available in the following screenshot. NSW and VIC will appear here when the ‘redesign is completed’.. no firm date.
It seems Tom Hollander at Microsoft has a sense of humour, commenting on today’s announcement in his most recent post..
While we’re very excited to be able to finally confirm this news, there are a number of rumours surrounding this announcement which we are not able to confirm or deny at this time:
- We have no comment on whether these new sub-regions will be deployed in the Sydney Opera House and on a Melbourne tram
- We have no comment on whether we will be employing a “Star Wars” defence mechanism to protect the infrastructure against attacks from crocodiles, funnel web spiders and drop bears
- We have no comment on whether the fans in the servers will spin in the opposite direction to those in our northern hemisphere servers
- We have no comment on whether the new servers will play a “Crikey!” sound when they boot
- We have no comment about whether the backup generators will be powered by beer (however, if this were true, we can confirm that it would not be Fosters).
You can read the full announcement over at the Microsoft Australia blog.
