South Africa is equipped to host Microsoft Azure, so what's the problem?

MS Best practices say you need 2 independent power utility companies to run a Azure data center.
 
No, I would not host servers in SA just for Titan Fall. The Southern Africa market is just too small to justify installing anything here when existing installations can service us from overseas.
 
Microsoft is not known to outsource so it will not use the existing, all but saturated, SA datacentre market. They will happily acquire one, if they cannot build their own.
 
Last edited:
Having rather limited insight into this and thanks to the lack of "real response" from Microsoft. I can only come to the conclusion that:

1. It's not going to be profitable (enough)
2. They just don't know if it's going to be profitable (nobody has thought to do the business case)
3. There are genuine technical limitations OR
4. The same reason Netflix, Hulu, Ebay, Amazon, and Apple don't really have a presence here = TIA!
 
I am surprised with how easy people throw comments around. With regards to the SLA's... Azure's SLA's are around integrated services which is completely different than a single server SLA. Nobody in SA has experience of running the full set of Azure applications so I don't know how they can easily state that they can meet the SLAs? They may, or they may not... but even though they have experience in running infrastructure similar to portions of Azure nobody in SA has run all the components simultaneously. And these SLA percentages are wicked... because up-time is the intersection of probabilities of components. Even MS and Amazon has trouble keeping their own SLA's. And what is really, really difficult about it ... problems come with change and the Azure cloud (like the Amazon cloud) updates and changes continuously. Old methods of change control suddenly become impossible.

And I would also like know how much experience local companies have running the hardware Microsoft is deploying? They are not running generic Dell servers. They are running 96 servers in a 48U rack!

I think the biggest constraint is for it to become economically feasible you need scale. Because Azure is a on-demand service you should be able to cater for peak demand -- and it is very uneconomical to let servers sit idle. And for fail-over and updates you need spares on the side - again the bigger the data center the more efficient you can design for fail-over and updates. There is a reason why there is only a hand full data centers around the globe.

I am not saying that Azure in SA will be impossible. It is not just as easy as booting up a couple of servers ordered from Dell and popping the "Windows Azure Installation Disks" in them.

When it comes to Azure there are some really interesting things on the internet. Mark Russinovich especially has some very cool inside information about how Azure is managed.
 
Sanji said:
MS Best practices say you need 2 independent power utility companies to run a Azure data center.
Click to expand...

Not entirely correct. MS best practices say you need a Tier 4 facility, and that by definition implies 2 independent power sources. There is one operational Tier 4 facility in South Africa, Microsoft require a minimum of two for DRP purposes. When the second facility comes online eventually, we may see some movement in this area. Until then, not going to happen.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X