Wednesday, February 03, 2010

I want my XDrive!

I caught Mary-Jo Foley’s post on this topic last week…
Microsoft is making available to testers a beta of Windows Azure Drive (formerly known as XDrive), which will allow them to create automatic backups of Windows applications that they may want to move to the Azure cloud.
I think this is a great thing for Microsoft to do. Basically, XDrive will enable Windows applications to be run against an Azure-based cloud “drive” that supports NTFS. Now wouldn’t that be nice to have your application work against your C: drive one day and then re-configure it the next to run against your XDrive? Voila, your data is in the cloud. This is certainly something that I would want as a configuration option for any new, green-field application – an out-of-the-box configuration option to use cloud storage.

Microsoft is clearly doing this to help migrations to the cloud and that’s awesome just in itself. As a consumer, I really want to point – for example – NTBackup at my XDrive.

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1 comment:

Kamran said...

If you could point NTBackup at a cloud-based XDrive you would no longer need Quest OnDemand Recovery Manager :)

It is interesting how MS is making it increasingly easier to intergrate on premise/intranet apps with Azure.