CPS is a pre-integrated, pre-deployed, Microsoft validated solution built on Dell hardware, Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. It combines the efficiency and agility of cloud computing, along with the increased control and customization achieved in virtualized, multi-tenant environments. CPS scales from a single rack to up to four racks and is optimized for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS for Windows and Linux) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) style deployments. Let’s take a closer look at CPS At the hardware layer, a customer can deploy CPS in increments from one to four racks. Each rack has
- 512 cores across 32 servers (each with a dual socket Intel Ivy Bridge, E5-2650v2 CPU)
- 8 TB of RAM with 256 GB per server
- 282 TB of usable storage
- 1360 Gb/s of internal rack connectivity
- 560 Gb/s of inter-rack connectivity
- Up to 60 Gb/s connectivity to the external world
A single rack can support up to 2000 VM’s (2 vCPU, 1.75 GB RAM, and 50 GB disk). You can scale up to 8000 VM’s using a full stamp with four of these racks. Of course customers have the flexibility of choosing their VM dimensions, as we have seen with the private preview deployments with CPS.
CPS uses software components that customers are familiar with (Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack), so there is no retooling needed to operate CPS. It comes with integrated anti-virus, fabric based backup for all VM’s, disaster recovery, orchestrated patching, monitoring, an Azure-consistent self-service portal (Windows Azure Pack) for tenants, REST-based API for programmatic interaction and automation using PowerShell. CPS also provides PaaS services such as “Websites” and Database-as-a-service. There are no additional components to buy to make it a complete cloud solution.