As servers continue their increasingly precarious climb along the curve of Moore’s law, so do the major providers keep upping the ante on the cost-efficiency and power of their instances. Last week saw yet another milestone passed on that journey after Microsoft Corp. added a new type of virtual machine to its public cloud that is touted as the biggest on the market.

A single GS-Series instance can provide up to 64 terabytes of capacity with more than twice the storage throughput of the closest alternative, according to the company, which makes it possible to carry out as many as 8,000 I/O operations per second. As a result, the configuration is well-suited for running larger database deployments that would normally have to be split across multiple smaller virtual machines.

Fewer instances to manage in turn means less administrative overhead and, potentially, better utilization as well. Those are the same objectives that drove Amazon Inc. to acquire a nine-year-old video management specialist called Elemental Technologies Inc. last week in deal reportedly valued at some $500 million.

The outfit’s encoding and transcoding software will be incorporated into its public cloud to provide media companies with an economic way to deliver content across multiple screens. It’s a niche but potentially highly lucrative market that easily justifies the price tag of the acquisition, especially given that Elemental Technologies already lists the likes of Comcast Corp and ESPN Inc. among its customers.

But media companies aren’t the only ones struggling to keep up with the proliferation of mobile devices. Delivering the right content in the right format is an equally great challenge for everyday enterprises when its comes to their internal business applications, which is the problem VMware Inc. hopes to address with the new offering it introduced against the backdrop of Amazon’s acquisition.

Project A², combines its AirWatch mobile management software with the application delivery technology gained through the purchase of CloudVolumes Inc. last year to make it easier for organizations to adapt their applications for the device-agnostic nature of Windows 10. The suite will enable administrators to consistently enforce security policies across all the different types of end-points on the corporate network.

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