Monat: Juli 2017

Azure SQL Data Warehouse previews 3x compute scale with unlimited columnar storage

Our goal when we launched Azure SQL Data Warehouse was to create a SQL-based, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse that would serve as the platform for analytics at massive scale. By separating compute from the storage customers have been empowered to also create highly elastic solutions. Elastic scale enables customers to provision in minutes, scale in seconds and pause or resume the service on demand affording complete control of compute consumption.

Today we are making an exciting announcement. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is increasing its compute scale threefold; raising the compute scale from 6,000 DWU to 18,000 DWU so that customers can run their most compute intensive data warehouse workloads in the cloud. Azure SQL Data Warehouse will also support unlimited columnar storage at these new performance levels.

Companies including Toshiba, MediaBrix and Integral Analytics have all embraced the separation of compute and storage pioneered by Azure SQL Data Warehouse to deliver simple, highly elastic and scalable analytical solutions in the cloud.

It is now almost twelve months to the day since Azure SQL Data Warehouse has been available in Azure. What an incredible year it has been! The service is in thirty regions worldwide, making it the most broadly available cloud data warehouse in the world with almost twice the regional coverage of any other cloud data warehouse service; empowering companies to drive new analytical insights from their data wherever and whenever they need to do so.

With this preview, customers can scale their data warehouse workloads in Azure to new heights; driving answers to the most demanding analytical questions using our fully featured, enterprise class, SQL engine. Unlimited columnar storage is also important, as the diversity, variety and volume of customer data continues to grow at exponential rates. With PolyBase automatically scaling with the system, no additional work is required to take advantage of all the additional computing horsepower that is now available. These features make it even easier for customers to curate and serve the vast quantities of data being amassed in their cloud infrastructure with Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

As with all our compute performance levels, these new scale options also come with the flexibility that Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides by default; securely separating compute and storage, elastically managing compute with pause & resume and providing full enterprise integration giving you the audit and compliance requirements you need at every level of scale. Whether you require federated authentication, transparent data encryption, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2 or SOC 3 compliance Azure SQL Data Warehouse has you covered.

In the last year, we have also been actively engaging with many of our customers. Their feedback has helped to shape our improvements and this service update. Our customers have advocated for even greater compute power and agility from Azure SQL Data Warehouse.  We see this inside Microsoft as well. Customers aren’t just wondering about petabyte scale. They are living in the petabyte world and thinking about solutions many times larger than that. Our customers, especially those at DW3000 and DW6000, have therefore been keen to know what is next in terms of compute and storage scale from the service.

“Our mission is to become the world’s No.1 online fashion destination for 20-somethings,” said Bob Strudwick, Chief Technology Officer of ASOS.com. “The scalability and performance provided by Azure SQL Data Warehouse supports our enterprise analytics platform and drives new insights for ASOS right across the business, helping us to deliver the best customer experience we can.”

Later this month, customers will be able to provision new preview instances of Azure SQL Data Warehouse at DW9000 and DW18000 through the Azure portal. Users will be able to scale with more compute capacity than ever before to drive their analytical workloads using our fully featured SQL engine. With unlimited columnar storage, customers will be free to use these new high scale performance levels to analyze unbounded volumes of data.

This is an exciting milestone in our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The customer success we have witnessed in one year has been incredibly energizing for the team. As we move into year two, we will continue to execute on our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse: building the largest and fastest cloud data warehouse in the world.

I encourage you to start using Azure SQL Data Warehouse. You can also sign up for the preview directly in the Azure portal. We look forward to welcoming you onto the service.
Quelle: Azure

Inspire 2017: New cloud services for partners to enable digital transformation

Today at Microsoft Inspire, more than 17,000 partners join us in Washington, D.C. to spend the week learning and sharing new ways to grow their business and help our mutual customers. Our customers look to Microsoft’s partner community to help them successfully navigate technology options and deliver cloud-based solutions that enable their digital transformation.

Today, I’m pleased to make several announcements that put Microsoft's innovation and global reach to work for our partners – and customers – in ways no other cloud vendor does.

Growing partner opportunities with the Microsoft Cloud

Last year we initiated a Microsoft Azure co-sell program to provide comprehensive sales and marketing support for partners building solutions with Azure. This new program was a first of its kind in the industry that aligned Microsoft’s large, global, salesforce behind partners. In just the first six months, this program helped close over $1 billion in annual contract value for Azure partners, created $6 billion in Azure partner pipeline opportunity, and generated more than 4,500 partner deals.

Azure is the only global, public cloud providing partners with this significant benefit through which Microsoft sales reps are paid up to 10% of the partner’s annual contract value when they co-sell qualified Azure-based partner solutions. This means Microsoft sales reps are specifically compensated to help Azure partners to drive new business and it gives partners have access to the global Microsoft sales force to grow their business.

To further the Azure co-sell program impact, we are making additional investments over the next 12 months. And, we are creating additional dedicated Channel Manager roles in Microsoft to supporting partners go to market efforts, helping their solutions reach new customers and integrating with our co-sell motion. Together these investments represent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in new co-sell incentives and support to help our partners grow their business.

We are also making it easier for partners to modernize their customers’ existing business applications, and build new ones, with a new program we are calling ISV Cloud Embed. With this new program, partners can purchase Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow as embeddable “building blocks” at discounts of up to 50%. In the same way partners build apps on Azure, they can now use these business applications capabilities to quickly add sales automation, service line and operational backend functionality to their own solutions. This reduces development time and costs by putting Microsoft engineering resources to work for them. Partners receive go-to-market support and an opportunity to reach 100 million commercial active users of Office 365 and a growing community of Dynamic 365 customers through Microsoft AppSource.

Lastly, we’re introducing the preview of Azure Managed Applications. Azure Managed Applications enables partners to deliver managed solutions through the Azure Marketplace. It serves as a channel not only to sell infrastructure and/or software through the marketplace, but also a way for partners to attach services and operational support to Azure customers. Managed applications streamline acquisition and deployment for customers, while outsourcing the management and operations of the solution to the partner.

From building on Azure, to industry leading co-sell support and new embeddable business application services, only Microsoft provides this comprehensive approach to assist partners in accelerating their business growth.

Azure Stack now ready to order via Hardware Partners

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, offering a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform from Azure datacenters all the way to edge locations such as mine shafts, factory floors or cruise ships. Together with Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo, we are announcing Microsoft Azure Stack integrated systems are now available to order. We have delivered Azure Stack software to our hardware partners, enabling us to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. Customers like Saxo Bank and Mitsui are integrating Azure Stack into their strategy to build modern applications across cloud and on-premises.

Additional news

To enable rapid innovation of data-centric applications, we’re announcing a 3x increase in compute scaling power of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, from 6,000 DWU to 18,000 DWU. As all companies become digital companies, the need for petabyte scale storage is increasing. At this scale, storing and querying data can be a massive undertaking, and becomes more complex as companies increasingly adopt AI. By separating compute from storage, it maximizes performance, creating a data warehouse built for the most advanced mobile, IoT and AI solutions. With this expanded offering, our partners and customers can deliver petabyte scale storage and querying.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), puts new compliance requirements on customers. In addition to the resources already available on the Microsoft Trust Center, we just released two new GDPR assessment tools. An interactive GDPR assessment tool is available to any business or organization that wants to assess their current state of GDPR readiness. We also released a detailed assessment tool, available through our extensive partner network, that provides customers with actionable guidance and detailed recommendations of Microsoft products that may support their path to GDPR compliance.

To learn more about today’s Inspire announcements – including Microsoft 365, a new set of commercial offerings – take a moment to read Judson Althoff’s Official Microsoft Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now

Throughout the Technical Previews, we’ve seen tremendous customer and partner excitement around Microsoft Azure Stack. In fact, we’re speaking with thousands of partners this week at our Microsoft Inspire event. Our partners are excited about the new business opportunities opened up by our ‘One Azure Ecosystem’ approach, which helps them extend their Azure investments to Azure Stack, to unlock new possibilities for hybrid cloud environments. In that vein, today we are announcing:

Orderable Azure Stack integrated systems: We have delivered Azure Stack software to our hardware partners, enabling us to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. You can now order integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo. 
Azure Stack software pricing and availability: We have released pricing for the pay-as-you-use and capacity-based models today, you can use that information to plan your purchases.
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) availability: ASDK, the free single-server deployment option for trial purposes, is available for web download today. You can use it to build and validate your applications for integrated systems deployments.

Azure Stack promise

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, thereby enabling a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform. Consistency removes hybrid cloud complexity, which helps you maximize your investments across cloud and on-premises environments. Consistency enables you to build and deploy applications using the exact same approach – same APIs, same DevOps tools, same portal – leading to increased developer productivity. Consistency enables you to develop cloud applications faster by building on Azure Marketplace application components. Consistency enables you to confidently invest in people and processes knowing that those are fully transferable. The ability to run consistent Azure services on-premises gets you full flexibility to decide where applications and workloads should reside. An integrated systems-based delivery model ensures that you can focus on what matters to your business (i.e., your applications), while also enabling us to deliver Azure innovation to you faster. 

In its initial release, Azure Stack includes a core set of Azure services, DevOps tooling, and Azure Marketplace content, all of which are delivered through an integrated systems approach. Check out this whitepaper for more information about what capabilities are available in Azure Stack at the initial release and what is planned for future versions.  

Hybrid use cases unlock application innovation

Azure and Azure Stack unlock new use cases for customer facing and internal line of business applications: 

Edge and disconnected solutions: You can address latency and connectivity requirements by processing data locally in Azure Stack and then aggregating in Azure for further analytics, with common application logic across both. We’re seeing lots of interest in this Edge scenario across different contexts, including factory floor, cruise ships, and mine shafts.
Cloud applications that meet varied regulations: You can develop and deploy applications in Azure, with full flexibility to deploy on-premises on Azure Stack to meet regulatory or policy requirements, with no code changes needed. Many customers are looking to deploy different instances of the same application – for example, a global audit or financial reporting app – to Azure or Azure Stack, based on business and technical requirements. While Azure meets most requirements, Azure Stack enables on-premises deployments in locations where it’s needed. Saxo Bank is a great example of an organization who plan to leverage the deployment flexibility enabled by Azure Stack.  
Cloud application model on-premises: You can use Azure web and mobile services, containers, serverless, and microservice architectures to update and extend existing applications or build new ones. You can use consistent DevOps processes across Azure in the cloud and Azure Stack on-premises. We’re seeing broad interest in application modernization, including for core mission-critical applications. Mitsui is a great example of an organization planning their application modernization roadmap using Azure Stack and Azure. 

Ecosystem solutions across Azure and Azure Stack

You can speed up your Azure Stack initiatives by leveraging the rich Azure ecosystem:

Our goal is to ensure that most ISV applications and services that are certified for Azure will work on Azure Stack. Multiple ISVs, including Bitnami, Docker, Kemp Technologies, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux, are working to make their solutions available on Azure Stack.  
You have the option of having Azure Stack delivered and operated as a fully managed service. Multiple partners, including Avanade, Daisy, Evry, Rackspace, and Tieto, are working to deliver managed service offerings across Azure and Azure Stack. These partners have been delivering managed services for Azure via the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and are now extending their offerings to include hybrid solutions. 
Systems Integrators (SI) can help you accelerate your application modernization initiatives by bringing in-depth Azure skillsets, domain and industry knowledge, and process expertise (e.g., DevOps). PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a great example of an SI that’s expanding their consulting practice to Azure and Azure Stack. 

Orderable integrated systems, free single-server kit for trial

Azure Stack has two deployment options:

Azure Stack integrated systems – These are multi-server systems meant for production use, and are designed to get you up and running quickly. Depending upon your hardware preferences, you can choose integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo (with Cisco and Huawei following later). You can now explore these certified hardware solutions and order integrated systems by contacting our hardware partners. These systems come ready to run and offer consistent, end-to-end customer support no matter who you call. They will initially be available in 46 countries covering key markets across the world.  
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) – ASDK is a free single server deployment that’s designed for trial and proof of concept purposes. ASDK is available for web download today, and you can use it to prototype your applications. The portal, Azure services, DevOps tools, and Marketplace content are the same across this ASDK release and integrated systems, so applications built against the ASDK will work when deployed to a multi-server system. 

Closing thoughts

As an extension of Azure, Azure Stack will deliver continuous innovation with frequent updates following the initial release. These updates will help us deliver enriched hybrid application use cases, as well as grow the infrastructure footprint of Azure Stack. We will also continue to broaden the Azure ecosystem to enable additional choice and flexibility for you. 

I look forward to hearing what everyone does with Azure Stack!

– Mike 
Quelle: Azure