System Center 2012 R2 delivers unified management and agile system administration for the Cloud OS by offering consistent management experiences across on-premises, service provider, and Windows Azure environments. This unique approach, as outlined in this paper, helps you realize your datacenter transformation goals by delivering the following attributes:

Enterprise-class:

System Center 2012 R2 offers enterprise-class capabilities that can deliver best-in-class management of Windows Server infrastructure and first-party Microsoft workloads (such as Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL). With SAN-based storage management technologies you can virtualize even your most demanding workloads. In addition, System Center 2012 R2 enables virtual networking in isolated multi-tenant environments, resulting in extensive flexibility for your virtualized workloads.

Simple and cost-effective:

System Center 2012 R2 helps you reduce datacenter complexity. Service templates and runbooks simplify System Center infrastructure deployments. Open and extensible web-based interfaces into System Center 2012 R2 capabilities enable easy integration with your existing investments in portals or web-based tools. Furthermore, System Center supports at-scale management of innovative Windows Server storage technologies based on industry-standard hardware.

Application focused:

System Center 2012 R2 focuses on optimizing your applications and workloads through their lifecycle. Rich Unified management for the Cloud OS diagnostics and insight facilitate predictable application service level agreements (SLAs), including the ability to elastically scale applications across clouds. System Center 2012 R2 also facilitates standardized application provisioning to empower application owners.

Hybrid enabled:

System Center 2012 R2 enables hybrid cloud computing at its core. With System Center 2012 R2 you gain consistent management experiences that span across Windows Server and Windows Azure environments, including provisioning, automation, self-service, and monitoring.