Category Archives: Microsoft

Azure, CloudStack, Docker, Microsoft, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Windows Server

Microsoft targets customer datacentres with Azure Stack

Microsoft is bolstering its hybrid cloud appeal on the one hand, and going head to head with other large incumbents on the other

Microsoft is bolstering its hybrid cloud appeal on the one hand, and going head to head with other large incumbents on the other

Microsoft revealed a series of updates to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.

The company announced Azure Stack, software that consists of the architecture and microservices deployed by Microsoft to run its public-cloud version of Azure, including some of the latest updates to the platform like Azure Service Fabric and Azure App Fabric – which have made the architecture much more container-like.

Built on the same core technology as Azure but deployed in a customer’s datacentre, the company said Azure Stack makes critical use of among other things some of the company’s investments in software-defined networking.

The company also said it worked a number of bugs out of the next version of Windows Server (2016), with the second preview being made available this week; the net version of Windows Server will include a number of updates announced last month including Hyper-V containers and nano-servers, which are effectively Dockerised and slimmed-down Windows Server images, respectively.

Azure Stack will preview this summer and Windows Server 2016 is already available for preview.

The company also announced, Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), a hybrid cloud management service that supports Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack.

For Microsoft the updates are a sign of a significant push into hybrid cloud as it looks to align it’s the architecture of its Windows Server and Azure offerings and help customers manage workloads and operations in a multi-cloud world. Interestingly, by taking the Azure architecture directly to customer datacentres it’s effectively going head-to-head with other IaaS software vendors selling alternatives like OpenStack and CloudStack – Dell, HP, Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and so forth – which is in some ways new territory for the cloud giant.

Azure, Big Data, Data lakes, Infrastructure as a Service, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Oliver Chiu

Microsoft jumps into the data lake

Azure Data LakeAt the company’s annual Build conference this week Microsoft unveiled among other things an Azure Data Lake service, which the company is pitching as a hyperscale big data repository for all kinds of data.

The data lake concept is a fairly new one, the gist of it being that data of varying types and structures is created at such a high velocity and in such large volumes that it’s prompting a necessary evolution in the applications and platforms required to handle that data.

It’s really about being able to store all that data in a volume-optimised (and cost-efficient) way that maintains the integrity of that information when you go to shift it someplace else, whether that be an application / analytics or a data warehouse.

“While the potential of the data lake can be profound, it has yet to be fully realized. Limits to storage capacity, hardware acquisition, scalability, performance and cost are all potential reasons why customers haven’t been able to implement a data lake,” explained Microsoft’s product marketing manager, Hadoop, big data and data warehousing Oliver Chiu.

The company is pitching the Azure Data Lakes service as a means of running Hadoop and advanced analytics using Microsoft’s own Azure HDInsight, as well as Revolution-R Enterprise and other Hadoop distributions developed by Hortonworks and Cloudera.

It’s built to support “massively parallel queries” so information is discoverable in a timely fashion, and built to handly high volumes of small writes, which the company said makes the service ideal for Internet of Things applications.

“Microsoft has been on a journey for broad big data adoption with a suite of big data and advanced analytics solutions like Azure HDInsight, Azure Data Factory, Revolution R Enterprise and Azure Machine Learning. We are excited for what Azure Data Lake will bring to this ecosystem, and when our customers can run all of their analysis on exabytes of data,” Chiu explained.

Pivotal is also among a handful of vendors seriously bought into the concept of data lakes. However, although Chiu alluded to cost and performance issues associated with the data lakes approach, many enterprises aren’t yet at a stage where the variety, velocity and volume of data their systems ingest are prompting a conceptual change in how that data is being perceived, stored or curated; in a nutshell, many enterprises are still too siloed – not the least of which in how they treat data.

21Vianet, Azure, Datacastle, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Ralph Haupter, Wing Ker

Datacastle, 21Vianet partner on cloud data protection, backup in China

Datacastle is partnering with 21Vianet to deploy its cloud backup solutions in China

Datacastle is partnering with 21Vianet to deploy its cloud backup solutions in China

Backup provider Datacastle has partnered with 21Vianet in a deal that will see it resell its cloud-based backup and data protection solutions to customers in China.

The solution is being deployed on Microsoft Azure, which partners with 21Vianet to host its infrastructure-as-a-service in the region.

“21Vianet is committed to bringing the worldwide best-in-class cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure in China,” said Wing Ker, president of Microsoft Cloud Operations at 21Vianet. “Enterprises in China will now have endpoint data protection option to protect against ransomware, data loss, and data breach through our partnership with Datacastle.”

Ron Faith, chief executive officer of Datacastle said: “Given 21Vianet’s expertise operating Microsoft Azure in China and their trusted status as a datacentre service provider, customers in China will get the best performance, reliability and security.”

Microsoft and 21Vianet announced general availability of Microsoft Azure Services in China just over a year ago, which launched amid much fanfare. The service launched with about 3,000 clients signed up to use it, and Ralph Haupter, corporate vice-president and chief executive of Microsoft Greater China recently said Azure has accumulated more than 50,000 customers, mainly SMEs.

AWS, Google, IBM, John Dinsdale, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Synergy Research

Synergy Research: AWS still larger than four biggest rivals combined

AWS is larger than its four top rivals combined

AWS is larger than its four top rivals combined

Amazon pulled the curtain back from its AWS business last week, announcing its cloud services now rakes in over $5bn annually. John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group said that now puts the e-commerce giant ahead of most of its largest competitors.

Amazon recently reported its cloud business took in revenues of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and enjoyed close to 50 per cent growth year on year. This is the first time the e-commerce giant has publicly disclosed AWS revenues.

Following on from that, some vendors which shall remain nameless (AWS competitors) worked behind the scenes to remind press off how much more profitable their cloud businesses are by comparison. But Synergy Research data suggests AWS is far larger than most of its competitors combined, at least in the infrastructure services market specifically.

Microsoft enjoys the highest revenue growth rate and IBM is leading private & hybrid services segment, but according to Synergy AWS continues to grow faster than the market as a whole, and that its market share approached 30 per cent in the most recently reported quarter.

Google is quietly gaining share though it remains just half the size of Microsoft in this market, the firm said.

“Across the full and varied spectrum of cloud activities there are now six companies that can lay a valid claim to having annual cloud revenue run rates in excess of $5 billion – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and salesforce – and all are able to claim leadership in different parts of the cloud market,” Dinsdale said.

“However, on a strict like-for-like basis AWS remains streets ahead of the competition in cloud infrastructure services. Furthermore, this part of the cloud market is growing much more rapidly than SaaS or cloud infrastructure hardware and software.”

Like-for-like comparisons seems scarce in cloud revenue reporting, not the least of which because it’s such a nascent sector. Considering the market leader in cloud only just started publicly disclosing revenues tacked onto that business, it may be some time before vendors and service providers come up with standard definitions for what can be reported as ‘cloud’ (for instance, IBM recently reported its annual cloud revenues now exceed $7.7bn).

Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (which includes IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) now total exceed $5bn.

Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Google, Microsoft

Amazon at the top of the Cloud Market

On Thursday, Amazon released their financial performance numbers, and they proved that Amazon is at the top of the cloud market compared to their competitors. Though they are known as an online marketplace, most of their stock market returns and revenue has come from renting processing power to start ups and enterprises.

 

Amazon was the leader in popularizing the cloud-computing field, and for a while they were the only ones to offer such services. This allowed for them to gain an advantage when others began to offer cloud-computing services. Others saw this field as an opportunity to tap into hundreds of billions of dollars. Microsoft has been especially committed to advancing in the field.

 

Though Amazon is the leader by a long shot, its resources are much lower than its competitors who have billions of dollars stashed away. Cloud computing demands heavy investments to set up data centers around the world as well as research and development if the field is to continue to grow and advance.

 

Amazon-Web-Services-Logo

 

In their first quarter reports, Amazon Web Services reported earnings of $1.57 billion and their operating income was $265 million. These statistics are strange coming from a company who often reports losses. This drove Amazon shares up by more than 6% in after-hours trading, and stock is at an all time high.

 

Microsoft, who ranks in at number 2 for cloud computing, reported that its annual revenue from its commercial cloud business would be $6.3 billion based on recent performance. Amazon predicted a similar figure of $5.16 billion. However, included in Microsoft’s number is revenue from different online applications. Azure, the Microsoft equivalent of Amazon’s cloud services, was estimated to be one-tenth of AWS.

 

microsoft

 

AWS got its start about a decade ago as a way to provide computing power to different divisions of Amazon. It has such a positive impact that it then was being offered to start-ups struggling to scale. After this, Amazon focused on expanding market share like it usually does, and it worked.

 

AWS was expected to rival the other businesses within Amazon. The cloud business has been growing by roughly 40% per year, which is twice the rate of the company overall.

 

Recently though, Google’s cloud service has been competing with AWS on pricing, which has been hurting profitability. Amazon has tried cutting prices many times at the expense of revenue growth. Their solution has been to provide other services such as database software and analytics. Amazon has also increased the number of resellers.

 

The big battle is going to be getting to the large companies that have the largest cloud computing needs.  Many companies just floated through the first years of the cloud, they were not ones to adopt the latest technology. They had compliance and contracting processes to follow. Now, cloud computing is commonplace at these companies.

 

Microsoft’s cloud business has doubled in the last year. This is great considering how they have been suffering from low PC sales. Analysts believe that Microsoft has the edge in obtaining larger companies for clients. This is because they might be able to convince them to use their cloud services in addiction to the Microsoft products they already use. For start-ups though, cloud computing and AWS are synonymous.

 

The cloud computing market is going to continue to grow, and no single company can cover all aspects of it. It will be exciting to see where things go from here.

The post Amazon at the top of the Cloud Market appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Amy Hood, Financial Results, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Satya Nadella

Microsoft doubles cloud revenue in Q3

Nadella said Microsoft is well on its way to becoming a cloud-first, mobile-first company

Nadella said Microsoft is well on its way to becoming a cloud-first, mobile-first company

Microsoft pulled in $21.7bn in revenues for the three months ending March 31, 2015, up 6 per cent year on year. But the company said its commercial cloud revenue more than doubled in the past quarter alone.

Microsoft reported mixed success in its devices segment (Surface revenues increased 44 per cent; phone revenues decreased, with volumes this quarter shifting from 10.5 to 8.6 million units sold) and Windows OEM revenues declined.

But he company reported commercial cloud revenue grew 106 per cent (111 per cent in constant currency), driven by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online. Microsoft claims its cloud services now have an annualized revenue run rate of $6.3bn.

Office 365 and Azure accounts for a great deal of that growth according to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief exec. Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to over 12.4 million, up 35 per cent sequentially

“We have 50 trillion objects stored in Azure, a three times growth year-over-year in storage transactions, and more than five trillion in March alone. And Azure websites are growing with nearly half a million sites hosted,” Nadella said during a call with analysts and journalists this week.

“It’s clear that we are well on our way to transforming our products and businesses across all of Microsoft. The early signs are evident in how our customers are using our products.”

“Our momentum in the cloud is a highlight. Increasingly, customers are choosing Microsoft cloud services to transform their own businesses, going beyond just moving existing workloads to the cloud. These results showcase our ability to transform and perform simultaneously.”

However, Office commercial products and services revenue declined 2 per cent.

“Enterprise penetration is accelerating with over half of all agreements signed during the quarter including cloud services,” added Amy Hood, the company’s chief financial officer.

data protection, Data security, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Scott Charney

Microsoft to improve transparency, control over cloud data

Microsoft wants to improve the security of its offerings

Microsoft wants to improve the security of its offerings

Microsoft has announced a series of measures to give customers more control over their cloud-based data, a move it claims will improve transparency around how data is treated as well as the security of that data.

The company announced enhanced activity logs of user, admin and policy-related actions, which customers and partners can tap into through a new Office 365 Management Activity API to use for compliance and security reporting.

Microsoft said by the end of this year it plans to introduce a Customer Lockbox for Office 365, which will give Office users the ability to approve or reject a Microsoft engineer’s request to log into the Office 365 service.

“Over the past few years, we have seen the security environment change and evolve. Cyber threats are reaching new levels, involving the destruction of property, and governments now act both as protectors and exploiters of technology. In this changing environment, two themes have emerged when I talk with our customers – 1) they want more transparency from their providers and more control of their data, and 2) they are looking for companies to protect their data through leading edge security features,” explained Scott Charney, corporate vice president, trustworthy computing at Microsoft.

“In addition to greater control of their data, companies also need their technology to adhere to the compliance standards for the industries and geographic markets in which they operate.”

The company is also upping its game on security and encryption. Office 365 already encrypts data in transit, but in the coming months Charney said the company plans to introduce content-level encryption, and by 2016 plans to enable the ability for customers to require Microsoft to use customer-generated and customer-controlled encryption keys to encrypt their content at rest.

It also plans to bolster network security through Azure-focused partnerships with the likes of Barracuda, Check Point, Fortinet, Websense, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and Alert Logic, and broaden the security capabilities of its enterprise mobility management suite.

Microsoft has over the past couple of years evolved into a strong proponent of and active participant in discussions around data security and data protection, including legislative change impacting these areas in the US. It’s also among a number of US cloud providers that are convinced many still lack trust in the cloud from a security standpoint, consequently hampering its ability to make inroads into the cloud market, which gives it an added incentive to double down on securing its own offerings.

Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Microsoft

Amazon and Microsoft Bring Public Cloud Storage to a New Level

Microsoft announced last week that Azure Premium Storage would soon become widely available. The week before this announcement, Amazon launched their Elastic File System, a new public storage cloud, at the AWS Summit. Both of these have helped the adoption of using the cloud.

 

Public storage is usually available in one of three types. Object storage is exposed via standard REST APIs to store and retrieve data. Block storage files are attached to a VM and then become available as local disks. Lastly, archival storage is an alternative to tape-based backing systems. This type of storage is used to store data that is not accessed very often. These three storage types address specific situations, but the network file share equal on the public cloud is missing from the equation.

 

Amazon’s Elastic File System (EFS) provides multiple E2 instances with low-latency, shared access to file systems. EFS provides flexible capacity that adjusts as files are added or removed and is accessible from both Microsoft Windows and Linus operating systems. Because it is available as a multi-user, shared service, it is being backed up with SSD-based storage. The data is copied over multiple zones for redundancy and availability. EFS integrates with Amazon’s security model based on Identity and Access Management (IAM) and VPC security groups. Managers can use standard file and directory permissions to control who can access the systems.

 

AWS_EFS-750x400

 

Before this service, customers had to set up dedicated file servers, and this extra step resulted in higher operating and maintenance costs. With EFS, customers get a managed file sharing service backed by SLA, and they only pay for what they use each month. Amazon is charging $0.30 per GB per month, which is 10 times more expensive than Amazon S3 which costs $0.03 per GB per month (excluding access charges and bandwidth). However, while the data stored in S3 can be accessed from any application, the data stored on EFS is available only to those applications running in Amazon EC2. EFS is also primarily meant for administration and management.

 

Amazon is not the first to offer a shared file system like this. Microsoft’s Azure announced a file service last year. Customers look for performance matching when they decide to shift their workloads to the cloud. In recent years, public cloud providers tried to address this by moving to Solid State Drives (SSDs). This type of storage is expensive, but customers still prefer to run their workload sets on them. Microsoft’s Azure Premium Storage claims to offer the best public cloud storage for this type of work. The Premium Storage is aimed for Azure VM workloads that require constant IO performance and low latency. It needs to be attached to Azure DS Series VMs in the form of a Page Blob or Data Disk. Multiple disks can be attached to a VM in order to get up to 32 TB of storage per VM. With the right configuration, VMs can reach what is considered the best performance on the public cloud: 50,000 IOPS.

 

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The new storage can be used by both Windows and Linux VMs. The fee structure is as follows: 128GB for $17.92, 512GB for $66.56 and 1TB for $122.88.

The post Amazon and Microsoft Bring Public Cloud Storage to a New Level appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Azure, Jean Paoli, Linux containers, Mark Russinovich, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Microsoft debuts container-like architecture for cloud

Microsoft is trying to push more cloud-friendly architectures

Microsoft is trying to push more cloud-friendly architectures

Microsoft has announced Azure Service Fabric, a framework for ISVs and startups developing highly scalable cloud applications which combines a range of microservices, orchestration, automation and monitoring tools. The move comes as the software company looks to deepen its use of – and ties to – open source tech.

Azure Service Fabric, which is based in part on technology included in Azure App Fabric, breaks apart apps into a wide range of small, independently versioned microservices, so that apps created on the platform don’t need to be re-coded in order to scale past a certain point. The result, the company said, is the ability to develop highly scalable applications while enabling low-level automation and orchestration of its constituent services.

“Service Fabric was born from our years of experience delivering mission-critical cloud services and has been in production for more than five years. It provides the foundational technology upon which we run our Azure core infrastructure and also powers services like Skype for Business, InTune, Event Hubs, DocumentDB, Azure SQL Database (across more than 1.4 million customer databases) and Bing Cortana – which can scale to process more than 500 million evaluations per second,” explained Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure.

“This experience has enabled us to design a platform that intrinsically understands the available infrastructure resources and needs of applications, enabling automatically updating, self-healing behaviour that is essential to delivering highly available and durable services at hyper-scale.”

A preview of the service will be released to developers at the company’s Build conference next week.

The move is part of a broader architectural shift in the software stack powering cloud services today. It’s clear the traditional OS / hypervisor model is limited in terms of its ability to ensure services are scalable and resilient for high I/O applications, which has manifested in among other things a shift towards breaking down applications into a series of connected microservices – something which many equate Docker and OpenStack with, among other open source software projects.

Speaking of open source, the move comes just days after Microsoft announced MS Open Tech, the standalone open source subsidiary of Microsoft, will re-join the company, in a move the company hopes will drive further engagement with open source communities.

“The goal of the organization was to accelerate Microsoft’s open collaboration with the industry by delivering critical interoperable technologies in partnership with open source and open standards communities. Today, MS Open Tech has reached its key goals, and open source technologies and engineering practices are rapidly becoming mainstream across Microsoft. It’s now time for MS Open Tech to rejoin Microsoft Corp, and help the company take its next steps in deepening its engagement with open source and open standards,” explained Jean Paoli, president of Microsoft Open Technologies

“As MS Open Tech rejoins Microsoft, team members will play a broader role in the open advocacy mission with teams across the company, including the creation of the Microsoft Open Technology Programs Office. The Programs Office will scale the learnings and practices in working with open source and open standards that have been developed in MS Open Tech across the whole company.”

Microsoft, Microsoft blogs, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 10, Parallels Desktop for Mac, run windows on mac, Windows, Windows blogs, Windows on mac

10 Best Windows Blogs to Bookmark

Last week, we shared our top picks for the best Mac blogs out there. This week, we’re continuing the trend, only this time, we’re listing our favorite blogs and websites focused on Windows: The Office Blogs and The Official Microsoft Blog While neither of these are likely surprising, they are top picks for a reason—Microsoft […]

The post 10 Best Windows Blogs to Bookmark appeared first on Parallels Blog.