Cloud Computing Köln

Enhanced storage resiliency with Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant service 

In today’s globally connected environment, even minutes of downtime can disrupt supply chains, hinder customer experiences, and affect regulatory commitments costing organizations thousands of dollars per minute and risking lasting reputational harm. Data resiliency is no longer optional—it is the foundation that keeps mission‑critical applications running, teams productive, and compliance intact. Organizations must ensure continuous data availability and zero data loss to meet stringent regulatory and audit standards.

Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is an Azure first party, enterprise-grade file storage offering in the cloud built to deliver unmatched performance, security with instant provisioning, and enterprise data management capabilities like snapshots, replication, backups, and flexible, cost-efficient service levels. It’s the trusted platform for critical workloads and the engine behind numerous migrations that drive Azure enterprise cloud journeys.

As businesses scale, the impact of service disruptions grows, and storage platforms must evolve to help maintain operational continuity. To support these needs, we are introducing Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone‑redundant storage (ANF Elastic ZRS)—a new service that provides enhanced resiliency across availability zones (AZs) and advanced data management capabilities. Built on Azure infrastructure, ANF Elastic ZRS can be deployed rapidly, accelerating availability across a broad set of regions. As a customer, you benefit from a service that can quickly adapt, whether that means expanding to a new Azure region you require, or adopting new technological advancements faster.

Synchronous replication and service managed failover

Built on Microsoft Azure’s zone-redundant storage (ZRS) architecture, ANF Elastic ZRS synchronously replicates data across multiple AZs within a region.

The graphic below shows the high-level architecture of ANF Elastic ZRS.

The following summarizes the operational methodology used: 

Synchronous replication: ANF Elastic zone-redundant storage (ZRS) volume replicates data within your NetApp Elastic Account to three or more AZs within the primary region of choice.

Service managed failover: If one AZ goes down (think single datacenter failure, power outage), ANF Elastic ZRS automatically routes traffic to the failover zone that was chosen during initial setup without customer intervention. The mount target and service endpoint remain the same, so your applications barely notice.

Zero data loss and high availability for mission-critical applications: ANF Elastic ZRS ensures uninterrupted operations for mission-critical applications and regulated systems by combining synchronous replication with service-managed failover. This architecture guarantees zero data loss and seamless continuity even during zone-level failures, meeting enterprise resiliency standards.

Capabilities for enterprise mission-critical applications

NFS, SMB protocol support, multi-AZ file service: ANF Elastic ZRS supports NFS and SMB independently with the added benefit of zonal redundancy.

Rich enterprise data management capabilities: Instant writeable space-efficient snapshots, clones, tiering, and backup integration all powered by the NetApp ONTAP® Unified data management platform.

Metadata performance: Beyond consistent throughput, ANF Elastic ZRS provides efficient handling of metadata operations such as rapid file creation and fast enumeration of numerous small files, improving responsiveness of metadata-heavy workloads. Its shared QoS architecture dynamically allocates IOPS across volumes to maintain low-latency, metadata-intensive operations consistently.

Cost optimized: ANF Elastic ZRS delivers multi-AZ high availability in a single volume at a lower cost than cross-zone replication with three separate ANF volumes, making it an efficient and valuable investment. You can create volumes as small as 1 GiB, giving you the flexibility to optimize storage for workloads of any size.

Apart from the above capabilities that are already supported, we will be adding the below capabilities in the future:

Simultaneous multi-protocol, multi-AZ file service: The service will support simultaneous NFS, SMB, and Object REST API access to the same dataset. This flexibility is crucial for environments where Windows and Linux workloads share data, such as analytics platforms and enterprise file shares.

Custom region pair for cross-region replication: ANF Elastic ZRS will be offering the flexibility to choose custom region pairs for cross-region replication, meeting strict compliance and disaster recovery requirements for large enterprise customers. This capability ensures business continuity while aligning with unique geographic or regulatory needs.

Migration Assistant: This capability will simplify data movement from on-premises or other ONTAP® systems to Elastic ZRS service level for seamless cloud adoption.

Targeted use cases

Use caseHow ANF Elastic ZRS helps
General file shares

Corporate user data including home directories or departmental file shares, remain accessible even during zone outages, ensuring seamless employee productivity and business continuity.

Financial services and trading platforms

Delivers zero data loss and nonstop trading even in a zone outage, so financial apps stay compliant, and customers stay confident.

Kubernetes/containerized applications

Keeps Kubernetes and container workloads running even during zone outages by instantly synchronizing data across zones and enabling rapid, automated failover. Your stateful apps stay online with zero data loss and minimal downtime.

Applications

Ensure nonstop access to in-house/line of business apps, even if an AZ fails, as data stays online with zero outages or lost transactions.

Innovation in action

A global healthcare enterprise running mission-critical application, on-premises is looking to modernize its infrastructure by moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud. The organization’s top priorities are eliminating downtime during maintenance and ensuring seamless failover to maintain application availability.

By adopting ANF Elastic ZRS, the organization gained a fully managed, zone-resilient storage solution that synchronously replicates data across three Azure AZs. This ensures zero data loss and near-instant failover, even during zone outages or platform maintenance. The mission-critical application remains highly available without requiring operational intervention, dramatically improving uptime, and simplifying infrastructure management.

ANF Elastic ZRS delivers the same enterprise-grade features as existing Azure NetApp Files service levels—such as NFS/SMB support, snapshots, encryption, and backup—all while removing the complexity of managing high availability (HA) clusters or VM-level failover. For the healthcare provider, this translates into higher SLA compliance, reduced operational overhead, and a more resilient foundation for its mission-critical application landscape.

Take the next step toward resilient storage

NetApp on premises customers: this is the inflection point you’ve been waiting for to move to Azure. ANF Elastic ZRS‑ brings the ONTAP®-powered data management you trust to a fully managed, multi-AZ file service, so you can modernize mission‑AZ file service, so you can modernize mission‑critical workloads with enterprise resilience, meet availability commitments, and reduce operational overhead—without re‑architecting your applications.

ANF Elastic ZRS is available now in these Azure regions and we will be rapidly expanding region availability.

Learn more:

Understand Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage

Create an SMB volume for Azure NetApp Files

Create an NFS volume for Azure NetApp Files

Comparison of Elastic vs other ANF service levels

Explore ANF Elastic ZRS in Azure today
Join the ranks of enterprises who demand the best in performance, availability, and simplicity.

Start experimenting

The post Enhanced storage resiliency with Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant service  appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Claude Opus 4.6: Anthropic’s powerful model for coding, agents, and enterprise workflows is now available in Microsoft Foundry

At Microsoft we believe that intelligence and trust are the core requirements of agentic AI at scale. Built on Azure, Microsoft Foundry brings these capabilities together on a secure, scalable cloud foundation for enterprise AI. Today, with the launch of Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry, we bring even more capability to agents that increasingly learn from and act on business systems.

Explore Claude in Microsoft Foundry today

Claude Opus 4.6 brings Anthropic’s most advanced reasoning capabilities into Microsoft Foundry, our interoperable platform where intelligence and trust come together to enable autonomous work. In Foundry, Opus 4.6 can activate knowledge from everywhere: leveraging Foundry IQ to access data from M365 Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and the web. The model is best applied to complex tasks across coding, knowledge work, and agent-driven workflows, supporting deeper reasoning while offering superior instruction following for reliability.

Developers can now delegate their most complex work to AI systems for full-lifecycle development from, requirements gathering to implementation and maintenance. Business users can generate documents, perform research, and draft copy with professional polish and domain awareness.

At Adobe, we’re continuously evaluating new AI capabilities that can help us deliver more powerful, responsible, and intuitive experiences for our customers. We’ve been testing Claude models in Microsoft Foundry and are excited about the direction of Anthropic’s model roadmap. Foundry gives us a flexible, enterprise-ready environment to explore frontier models while maintaining the trust, governance, and scale that are critical for Adobe.
—Michael Marth, VP Engineering for Experience Manager and LLM Optimizer, Adobe

Introducing Opus 4.6: Frontier intelligence, built for real work

Claude Opus 4.6 is the latest version of Anthropic’s most intelligent model, and is considered the best Opus model for coding, enterprise agents, and professional work. With a 1M token context window (beta) and 128K max output, Opus 4.6 is ideal for:

Production code

Sophisticated agents

Office tasks

Financial analysis

Cybersecurity

Computer use

By combining Anthropic’s most advanced model with Foundry’s end-to-end tooling, customers can move from experimentation to production faster, without stitching together infrastructure.

1. Autonomous coding at a new level

Opus 4.6 handles large codebases well and is particularly effective at long-running tasks like refactoring, bug detection, and complex implementations.

This allows senior engineers to delegate work that previously took days, covering everything from requirements gathering to implementation and maintenance, while staying focused on reviews and decision-making.

With Foundry’s managed infrastructure and operational controls, teams can compress development timelines from days into hours, while maintaining the rigor required for real-world production systems.

Macroscope has relied on Anthropic’s frontier models to push what’s possible in AI code review, helping us catch the bugs that matter most to customers before they ever reach production. We’re incredibly excited to deepen this partnership by scaling on Azure infrastructure and delivering our product to teams around the world.
—Kayvon Beykpour, CEO & Co-Founder, Macroscope

2. Better knowledge work across the enterprise

Opus 4.6 delivers a step-change in how enterprises approach knowledge work, which Anthropic defines across three pillars: search, analyze, and create. In Microsoft Foundry, these capabilities can be applied directly to enterprise data, workflows, and agent-driven applications.

Opus 4.6 understands the conventions and norms of professional domains, producing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that look and read like expert-created work. Combined with Foundry’s governance and access controls, this makes Opus 4.6 a great fit for finance, legal, and other precision-critical industries where quality, context, and compliance matter.

At Dentons, we are scaling generative AI across drafting, review, and research workflows across our global teams. Claude in Microsoft Foundry brings the frontier reasoning strength we need for legal work, backed by the governance and operational controls required in an enterprise environment. Better model reasoning reduces rework and improves consistency, so our lawyers can focus on higher value judgment.
—Matej Jambrich, CTO, Dentons Europe

High context financial analysis

Opus 4.6 excels at connecting insights across regulatory filings, market reports, and internal enterprise data, surfacing conclusions that would traditionally take analysts days to compile.

Its advanced reasoning capabilities allow it to:

Navigate nuanced financial and regulatory contexts

Generate compliance-sensitive outputs

Maintain consistency and traceability across complex analytical workflows

When deployed through Microsoft Foundry, these workflows benefit from Azure’s security, compliance, and auditability, helping organizations apply frontier AI to high-stakes analysis with confidence.

3. Advancing agentic and computer use capabilities

According to Anthropic, Opus 4.6 delivers major gains in computer use, with strong performance on industry benchmarks for visual understanding and multi-step navigation. Opus 4.6 sets a new standard for computer use. Claude can now operate computers more accurately, handle more complex tasks, and work across multiple applications seamlessly.

It can interact with software, navigate interfaces, complete forms, and move data across applications. When deployed in Microsoft Foundry, these actions can run as secure, governed agents, enabling automation of workflows that span legacy systems, document processing, and operational tools.

Opus 4.6 can manage complex, multi-tool workflows with less oversight—an essential requirement for teams operating AI systems at scale.

Anthropic on Azure provides Momentic with the reliability guarantees needed to process millions of tokens per hour on state-of-the-art models like Opus 4.5. Azure’s platform works seamlessly with Anthropic’s SDK, even supporting beta features such as reasoning effort out of the box.
—Jeff Ann, CTO & Co-Founder, Momentic AI

4. Agents, security, and high-stakes reasoning

Opus 4.6 is also best suited for agentic workflows, reliably orchestrating complex tasks across dozens of tools. It can proactively spin up sub-agents, parallelize work, and drive tasks forward with minimal oversight.

For security workflows, Opus 4.6 delivers deep reasoning, enabling teams to identify subtle patterns and complex attack vectors with high accuracy.

Anthropic is a trusted partner for governments and companies alike. Their speed, accuracy, and toolkit are already helping Everstar make fast, safe nuclear energy deployments a reality. I’m excited to see these capabilities integrated natively on Azure for secure deployments for our government and nuclear customers.
—Kevin Kong, Founder & CEO, Everstar

New API capabilities co-launching with Opus 4.6

Alongside Opus 4.6, Anthropic is introducing new API capabilities, available through Microsoft Foundry—that give developers greater control, scalability, and efficiency:

Adaptive thinking: Allows Claude to dynamically decide when and how much reasoning is required, optimizing performance and speed on simpler tasks, while allowing Claude to think harder on complex tasks.

Context Compaction (beta): Supports long-running conversations and agentic workflows by summarizing older context as token limits are reached.

1M Context Window (beta): Support for up to 1M tokens, with premium pricing applied beyond 200K tokens.

Max effort control: A new max effort level joins high, medium, and low, offering finer control over token allocation across thinking, tools, and output.

128K Output Tokens: Enables richer, more comprehensive outputs in a single response.

Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry

As AI systems move from assistance to autonomy, success depends on more than frontier intelligence, it requires intelligence that can be trusted to operate in real-world environments. Claude Opus 4.6 brings advanced reasoning and long-horizon execution, and Microsoft Foundry provides the system context where that intelligence can be applied responsibly, at scale.

Together, Claude in Foundry enables organizations to move beyond isolated experiments and toward intelligent, agent-driven systems that deliver real business impact—grounded in trust, governance, and operational rigor.

Opus 4.6 is also available through Microsoft Copilot Studio, enabling organizations to quickly build, orchestrate, and deploy advanced AI agents without custom code.

Explore Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry
Explore how Claude Opus 4.6 can power trusted, autonomous work in Microsoft Foundry.

Discover Opus 4.6

The post Claude Opus 4.6: Anthropic’s powerful model for coding, agents, and enterprise workflows is now available in Microsoft Foundry appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Can high-temperature superconductors transform the power infrastructure of datacenters?

As the demand for AI and data-intensive computing is on the rise, the need for efficient and reliable power delivery is critical. Enter high-temperature superconductors (HTS), a game-changing technology that can improve energy efficiency by reducing transmission losses. Microsoft is investigating HTS technology to understand how our datacenters can meet the growing demand for power and how to improve our operational sustainability. Superconductors offer a ‘lossless’ advantage, making power transmission more efficient.

See here how Microsoft datacenters support cloud around the globe

Superconductors let electricity flow with no resistance. This means we can move power more efficiently and increase capacity more quickly. Microsoft is exploring how this technology could make electrical grids stronger and reduce the impact datacenters have on nearby communities. Because superconductors take up less space to move large amounts of power, they could help us build cleaner, more compact systems.

Using this technology could change how power moves through the cloud and support AI and other demanding workloads. To make this possible, we need to rethink traditional power designs and how datacenters move electricity today. By working with superconducting technology partners and system integrators, we aim to turn this advanced science into real solutions that help our customers and communities.

Judy Priest, corporate vice president and chief technical officer of Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft, and Erhan Karaca, Chief Technology Officer at VEIR, during factory test of 3MW superconducting cable.

How superconductors boost datacenter performance and efficiency

Reduction of datacenter impact through HTS capabilities.

Copper and aluminum are good conductors and are used today in most cloud infrastructure wiring and power lines. But HTS cables can do even better because they carry electricity with zero resistance. They are also smaller and lighter, and they don’t produce heat or introduce voltage drops as electricity travels through them. At the center of the technology are scalable high-availability cooling systems, maintaining HTS cables at cryogenic temperatures required to support the operational excellence of Microsoft’s datacenters. In copper, electrical current encounters resistance at every step, losing efficiency, generating heat, and limiting how much current we can move. Superconducting materials behave differently: once cooled, they create a pathway for current to move with zero resistance, eliminating losses, heat buildup, and removing limitations on how far the power can travel.

Why does this matter for datacenters specifically?

HTS is not new and has been researched for decades across energy, transportation, and advanced science. Only recently the economics and manufacturing aspects of this technology made it viable at Microsoft’s cloud scale. Datacenters can benefit from HTS because they concentrate massive electrical loads in compact footprints. Traditional conductors force operators to choose between expanding substations, adding more feeders, reducing deployment densities or curtailing growth. Superconductors break this tradeoff: they increase electrical density without expanding the physical footprint, allowing modern facilities to support AI-era power requirements within the same or even smaller physical constraints.

Inside the datacenters, more power delivered directly to the racks supports high-density, high-performance workloads with improved efficiency. HTS cables are lighter than copper and can carry current over longer distances, enabling further optimization of power distribution across racks and pods and reducing potential bottlenecks. We shared our vision for these novel architectures at OCP 2025 Summit.

In practice, HTS has already demonstrated the potential to reduce the size of the power cables by an order of magnitude when delivering power directly to a server rack—opening new possibilities for how power is distributed within a datacenter.

Ruslan Nagimov, principal infrastructure engineer for Cloud Operations and Innovation at Microsoft, near world’s first HTS-powered rack-prototype (superconducting line seen above the rack).

Increasing capacity with next‑gen power infrastructure

HTS technology also supports Microsoft’s long-term cloud plans. As our AI systems grow, power is still the biggest limit we face. By updating out power systems with superconductors, we can build electrical infrastructure that grows more easily with the rising demand for cloud services. This could even allow us to design new kinds of datacenter facilities in the future.

We need modern power systems that allow electrical capacity to scale dynamically without requiring entirely new power infrastructure. Next-gen superconducting transmission lines deliver an order of magnitude higher capacity than conventional lines at the same voltage level. In turn, they can accelerate the expansion and interconnection of datacenter sites, speeding up compute deployment to meet the growing global demand for cloud services. Superconductors represent a foundational shift for datacenters and the electrical grid, but unlocking their full potential will require reexamining traditional power system assumptions and rethinking today’s approaches to power transmission and datacenter design.

Superconductors are a category defining technology poised to transform how power is moved across the electricity value chain, stretching from generation to datacenter chips. At VEIR, we build complete power delivery solutions that take advantage of these remarkable materials, enabling customers to overcome critical bottlenecks in energy infrastructure, unlock new datacenter capacity faster, and achieve higher power and compute density.
Tim Heidel, CEO at VEIR (a Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund portfolio company)

Reduced impact on the grid and local communities

HTS systems reduce energy loss and require significantly less physical space for power delivery. From a grid perspective, they minimize voltage drop along transmission lines and can be used to introduce fault-current limiting capabilities, with the potential to enhance overall grid stability for high-demand facilities such as datacenters, but also for nearby homes, schools, hospitals and businesses.

Superconducting cables require smaller trenches and reduce the need for intrusive overhead power lines [Source: AMSC, LIPA Superconductor Project].

More importantly, this technology reduces the physical and social footprint of the power infrastructure, reducing the impact on local communities. Furthermore, expanding the electricity supply typically requires a complex effort that includes increasing electrical generation capacity and improving transmission and substation systems. Unlike traditional power lines, which rely on wider corridors and heavier, more visible infrastructure (tall overhead lines and expansive substations), HTS supports smaller, quieter, and far less intrusive systems. HTS transmission lines can transfer the same amount of power as conventional systems at lower voltage, reducing the setbacks and required right-of-ways. This translates to a better use of space, which reduces construction impact, shortens build timelines, and lowers pressure on surrounding communities.

Superconductors enabled ComEd to interconnect electrical grid substations in Chicago without disrupting local businesses or communities. Our proprietary solution uniquely increases grid resilience.
Daniel McGahn, CEO at American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC)

We are striving to accelerate indoor and outdoor applications of advanced power technologies like superconductors for faster and effective deployments of real-world datacenter infrastructure systems. Alongside breakthroughs in networking and cooling technologies like hollow-core fiber and microfluidics, high-temperature superconductors complete a strategic triad of power, network, and thermal innovation in our datacenters. You may never see the power lines, but HTS technology could be working behind the scenes to keep power, capacity, and AI infrastructure efficient, resilient, and future-ready, so our customers focus on what matters most: building and running their cloud infrastructure workloads.

Explore the future of datacenters

HTS is just one of the new technologies shaping the future of datacenters. As the cloud continues to grow, many other innovations—from advanced cooling systems to cleaner power solutions—are helping us build faster, smarter, and more sustainable facilities. Learn more about some of the other projects driving the next generation of datacenter design.

Learn more about Microfluidics cooling: Cooling at the micro level for Microsoft’s datacenters.

Learn more about how Microsoft Azure scales Hollow Core Fiber (HCF) production through outsourced manufacturing.

Learn more about building community-first AI infrastructure.

Get started with Azure today with a free account.

The post Can high-temperature superconductors transform the power infrastructure of datacenters? appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure