Microsoft Systems Architecture

Microsoft Systems Architecture (MSA) is a technology architecture that has been rigorously tested and proven in a partnered lab environment to provide exceptional planning and implementation guidance. It goes well beyond traditional technical white papers by physically building out integrated enterprise scenarios based on the MSA architectural principles and design goals. The end result is a validated architecture that complements the planning, build, test, and operations guidance. As a result, the complete IT life cycle is covered and tested with proven documentation. A trustworthy platform is one that embodies the design goals of availability, security, scalability, manageability, and reliability through adherence to sound architectural principles.

The idea is having great software architectures defined. The initiative is new to me but started long back by Microsoft. The business wise division and changes or deviations can be seen over the documentation. Microsoft does not define all of them on their own but the whole architectures are coming from detailed research and testing done with their partners like
Cisco Systems for networking
HP for servers and SAN storage
Unisys for servers
EMC for SAN storage
Brocade Communications for SAN fabric
CommVault Systems for backup/recovery
Emulex for Fibre Channel host bus adapters

More details can found by downloading the documentation on this. The new release of MSA 2.0 is .Net ready. That can be called as the new features over the previous versions of .Net. Offcourse the architecture will not be best for all, but it will be best available with Microsoft Technologies. It is highly customizable but will never recommend IBM WebSphere MQ over MSMQ. So it is our choice how to customize it.