Archivo de la categoría: Azure

Azure, Channel, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Scott Guthrie, Taylor Rhodes

Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft's public and private cloud technology

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology

In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.

Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

Azure, Datacentre, Kevin Turner, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, News & Analysis, Office 365

Microsoft to open two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is opening two cloud datacentres in Canada, the company said this week. The facilities, one in Toronto, Ontario and one in Montreal, Quebec, will deliver Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics to local customers.

The company said the datacentres would help companies and organisation in highly regulated sectors like healthcare, the public sector, higher education and financial services overcome data storage and compliance regulations.

“Companies and organisations that have to adhere to data storage requirements and compliance standards can now take advantage of the advantages offered by Microsoft services here in Canada,” said Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner.

Turner said the announcement speaks to Microsoft’s “deep and growing commitment” to Canada and its public and private sector organisations.

“Now customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of all commercial cloud services on their terms across Canada.”

This is Microsoft’s first big cloud datacentre push since the company announced the launch of Azure in Australia last year. Lately, however, Microsoft has seemed more focused on bolstering its position through hybrid cloud, announcing Azure Stack – a series of updates and architectural changes (more microservices) to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.

Azure, Cloud Foundry, Microsoft, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service

Cloud Foundry heads to Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a long awaited public preview of Cloud Foundry for Azure which the company said will help enable its customers with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

Microsoft has been talking about adding Cloud Foundry support to Azure for the better part of a year, and earlier this month the company drew one step closer to a beta release by demoing a Cloud Foundry deployment on its public cloud service.

In a blog post explaining the move Ning Kuang, senior program manager for Microsoft Azure said Cloud Foundry can be deployed quickly using an Azure Resource Manager template, or the through open source workload lifecycle manager BOSH.

“Hybrid and Multi-cloud support is one of the key strengths of Cloud Foundry and the Azure [Cloud Provider Interface] enables you to extend your private data to Azure for running Cloud Foundry based applications. In addition, we are working to ensure that Azure CPI will in work in a private cloud environment running on Azure Stack and we will have more on that to come in the near future,” Kuang explained.

“We’re hoping to release the public Beta in a few weeks and will then upstream the code back to the community source tree in a few months prior to GA,” she added.

Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular PaaSs around today so the move to support it may help on-board more devops-types to Microsoft Azure, which is currently one of the fastest growing infrastructure as a service platforms around (at least in terms of revenue).

Amazon, AWS, Azure, Content & Applications, Microsoft, NetSuite, News & Analysis, Steve Guggenheimer, Vendor, Zach Nelson

NetSuite ditches AWS in Microsoft partnership

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite has inked a deal with Microsoft in a move that will see the two companies link up the cloud-based financial and ERP platform with Microsoft Office, Windows and Azure.

As part of the deal the two companies have already integrated NetSuite and Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on (SSO) for customers using NetSuite together with Azure AD, and in the coming months plan to drive further integration between NetSuite and Office 365 – for instance, to be able to do things like connect NetSuite data to Microsoft Excel and PowerBI in a more seamless way.

The partnership will also see NetSuite move its service off Amazon Web Services, a long-time partner of the firm, as well as take its on-premise deployments and move them into Azure, now its “preferred cloud” provider, by the end of the year.

“We’re at the ‘end of the beginning’ of the cloud, in that the cloud business model that NetSuite pioneered in 1998 is becoming the de facto standard for how fast-growth businesses are run,” said Zach Nelson, NetSuite chief executive.

“We’re thrilled to work with Microsoft to deliver a fluid cloud environment across the key NetSuite and Microsoft applications that companies and their employees rely on to continually improve their day-to-day operations and run their business better and more efficiently,” Nelson said.

Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of developer platform & evangelism and chief evangelist for Microsoft also commented on the deal: “I’m excited about NetSuite’s support for Azure Active Directory for single sign-on, cloud-to-cloud integration and increasing our collaboration across mobile and cloud solutions. Our joint vision is all about giving people the freedom to get more done through the broadening set of devices they interact with that in turn helps businesses innovate and grow.”

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.

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.”

agriculture, Analytics, Azure, Fujitsu, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Vendor, Windows

Fujitsu, Microsoft collaborate on Azure, Internet of Things

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft announced an Internet of Things partnership focused on blending the former’s devices and IoT services for agriculture and manufacturing, powered by Windows software and Azure cloud services.

The move will see the two companies offer a solution that blends Fujitsu’s Eco-Management Dashboard, an IoT service for the agricultural sector, and Microsoft’s Azure database services so that data collected from sensors deployed throughout the operations can be analysed to help firms save money and streamline processes.

The companies said the platform has uses in other sectors and can be tailored to a range of different niche verticals.

“Leveraging the Fujitsu Eco-Management Dashboard solution alongside Microsoft Azure and the Fujitsu IoT/M2M platform, we are able to deliver real-time visualisation of the engineering process for big data analytics to improve the entire production process and inform decision-making,” said Hiroyuki Sakai, corporate executive officer, executive vice president, head of global marketing at Fujitsu.

“We are proud to partner with Fujitsu to enable the next generation of manufacturing business models and services enabled by IoT along with advanced analytics capabilities like machine learning,” said Sanjay Ravi, managing director, Discrete Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft. “Fujitsu’s innovation will drive new levels of operational excellence and accelerate the pace of digital business transformation in manufacturing.”

Fujitsu has been doubling down on IoT this year, with manufacturing looking to be a strong sector for those kinds of services according to anlaysts. In January the company announced plans to expand its two core datacentres in Japan in a bid to accelerate demand for its cloud and IoT services.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

IoT-World-banner-small

Azure, Docker, Hyper-V, Infrastructure as a Service, nano server, News & Analysis, Vendor, Windows Server

Microsoft unveils Hyper-V containers, nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled Hyper-V containers and nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled Hyper-V containers and nano servers

Microsoft has unveiled a number of updates to Windows Server including Hyper-V containers, which are essentially Docker containers embedded in Hyper-V VMs, and nano servers, a slimmed down Windows server image.

Microsoft said Hyper-V containers are ideal for users that want virtualisation-grade isolation, but still want to run their workloads within Docker containers in a Windows ecosystem.

“Through this new first-of-its-kind offering, Hyper-V Containers will ensure code running in one container remains isolated and cannot impact the host operating system or other containers running on the same host,” explained Mike Neil, general manager for Windows Server, Microsoft in a recent blog post.

“In addition, applications developed for Windows Server Containers can be deployed as a Hyper-V Container without modification, providing greater flexibility for operators who need to choose degrees of density, agility, and isolation in a multi-platform, multi-application environment.”

Windows Server Containers will be enabled in the next release of Windows Server, which is due to be demoed in the coming weeks, and makes good on Microsoft’s commitment to make the Windows Server ecosystem (including Azure) Docker-friendly.

The company also unveiled what it’s calling nano servers, a “purpose-built OS” that is essentially a stripped down Windows Server image optimised for cloud and container workloads. They can be deployed onto bare metal, and because Microsoft removed tons of code it boots up and runs more quickly.

“To achieve these benefits, we removed the GUI stack, 32 bit support (WOW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell. We are also adding Windows Server Roles and Features using Features on Demand and DISM. We are improving remote manageability via PowerShell with Desired State Configuration as well as remote file transfer, remote script authoring and remote debugging.  We are working on a set of new Web-based management tools to replace local inbox management tools,” the company explained.

“Because Nano Server is a refactored version of Windows Server it will be API-compatible with other versions of Windows Server within the subset of components it includes. Visual Studio is fully supported with Nano Server, including remote debugging functionality and notifications when APIs reference unsupported Nano Server components.”

The move is a sign Microsoft is keen to keep its on-premise and cloud platform ahead of the technology curve, and is likely to appeal to .NET developers who are attracted to some of the benefits of containers while wanting to stay firmly within a Windows world in terms of the tools and code used. Still, the company said it is working with Chef to ensure nano servers work well with their DevOps tools.