The trend that I’m seeing with my customers is that there is now a willingness to consider the Cloud for the deployment of mainstream database applications, especially if it’s a green fields project. In fact, some of my customers have already made the move and have deployed multiple SQL Servers in Amazon AWS and have

even deployed Availability Groups and Peer to Peer replication in this environment.

At the very least IT Managers are being asked by their CEOs, as part of infrastructure refresh projects, to consider the Cloud including hybrid solutions where databases are deployed in the Cloud and to On-premise SQL Servers.

As you probably know, Microsoft is pushing the Cloud pretty hard, in fact, in the future some SQL features will be deployed first to the Cloud based version of SQL Server and then to the On-premise version. In addition to their SQL Azure offering, Microsoft has recently released its Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform where you can purchase a windows virtual machine just like Amazon AWS. You can select fully loaded virtual machine templates for SQL Server and SharePoint to minimise provisioning time. You can find more information about Microsoft IaaS (here) and the SQL Server Hybrid Cloud Platform technical white paper can be found (here).

Of course, there are always some hairs and pit falls when moving to Cloud solutions. To ensure a smooth transition for customers, DBInsight has a SQL Server design and sizing service to help you design, size and deploy your SQL Server into the Cloud.  Visit our serving sizing information page (here).

Also see DBInsight’s Blog entries on how to maximise database backup and restore performance in an Amazon AWS environment.