Monat: August 2017

Announcing public preview of Azure Batch Rendering

This week SIGGRAPH 2017 is blasting away in Los Angeles and I can’t imagine a better place than the premier event for computer graphics to announce that Azure Batch Rendering will now move into public preview.

The complexities of cinematic productions, associated workflows, and infrastructure have always intrigued me, and they are honestly one of the very best examples of the hands-on value that Azure provides. Abstracting away infrastructure considerations, deployment, and management rarely made more sense, while at the same time being able to scale beyond the physical boundaries of your on-premises environments.

Enabling artists, engineers, and designers to submit rendering jobs seamlessly via client applications such as Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, or via our SDK, Azure Batch Rendering accelerates large scale rendering jobs to deliver results to our customers faster.

Back in May during the Microsoft Build conference, we announced the first limited preview of Batch Rendering, a milestone in integrating the high-end graphics user experience with the power of Azure. Since then, hundreds of curious and excited customers have been putting Batch Rendering through its paces and have provided invaluable feedback to us on the product – thank you!

While Azure Batch Rendering with Autodesk is moving to public preview, we are also excited to announce a limited preview of V-Ray in partnership with Chaos Group. With V-Ray being supported for Maya and 3ds Max, this is another great step forward in supporting a rich and vibrant ecosystem on Azure.

Azure will continue to work with Autodesk, Chaos Group, and other partners to enable customers to run their day to day rendering workloads seamlessly on Azure. Batch Rendering will provide tools, such as client plugins, offering a rich integrated experience allowing customers to submit jobs from within the applications with easy scaling, monitoring, and asset management. Additionally, the SDK, available in various languages, allows custom integration with customer’s existing environments.

In addition to the our Batch Rendering announcements, we are launching a preview of a cool new management application, Batch Labs! Batch Labs is a cross-platform desktop management tool which includes job submission capabilities as well as a rich management and monitoring experience, along with the ability to manage asset uploads and downloads. Batch Labs hosts a marketplace of supported applications which can be easily extended by customers for their own applications and custom workflows.

Lastly, I’d like to invite you to come and meet our team at SIGGRAPH 2017. We’re hosting sessions and will be at booth #923, showing off a bunch of cool demos with partners like Conductor, Avid, Vizua, JellyFish Pictures, and PipelineFX along with exciting Microsoft hardware like the HoloLens and new Surface Studio.

If you are in the Los Angeles area during the week, you’re more than welcome to use the promo code “MSFT2017” to register for a complimentary visitor pass to the expo floor of SIGGRAPH.

Thank you all for your support in hitting this important milestone for Azure Batch Rendering. We are looking forward to continue working with you on the further expansion of the product and welcome your continued feedback!

Get more information and documentation on using Azure Batch Rendering.
Quelle: Azure

Teradata Bolsters Analytics and Database capabilities for Azure

This post is co-authored with Rory Conway, Product Manager, Teradata on Azure.

The enterprise-class capabilities of Teradata Database have been enhanced for Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This is great news for organizations using, or wanting to try, Teradata Database as their engine for advanced analytics to deliver optimal business outcomes for areas such as customer experience, risk mitigation, asset optimization, finance transformation, product innovation, and operational excellence. Coupled with the recent launch of Teradata Demand Chain Management on Azure, these are substantial improvements that yield an impressive solution set worthy of your attention. Try it for yourself.

Teradata Primer

As you may already know, Teradata Corporation has long been regarded as the market’s leading data warehouse provider for analytics at scale. With more than $2B in revenue from over 1,400 customers and powered by 10,000 employees, Teradata has the deep roots and technical strength that large organizations seek when aligning with a strategic partner.

Teradata by the numbers:

35+ years of innovation and leadership
~1,400 customers in 77 countries
~10,000 employees in 43 countries
$2.8B in revenue in 2016

Teradata works with many leading firms:

Airlines – All top 6 airlines
Banking – 18 of top 20 global commercial and savings banks
Communications – 19 of top 20 telecommunications companies
Manufacturing – 13 of top 20 manufacturing companies
Retail – 15 of top 20 global retailers

Teradata’s reputation is based on analytic performance at scale. The company’s deployment strategy is centered on hybrid cloud and license portability – “Teradata Everywhere™” – which make it easier for customers to buy Teradata in smaller increments and grow consumption as needed, where needed.

Teradata’s market research predicts that more than 90 percent of companies will employ a mix of on-premises and cloud resources by 2020. As such, Teradata emphasizes software consistency across all its deployment options aided by a strong bench of services experts helping organizations evolve to hybrid architectures and derive the most value from their analytic investments.

Teradata Database on Azure

Now let’s turn our attention to the options. Teradata Database on Azure provides four tiers of software with different features at varying price points. You choose a bundle corresponding to what you need for the workload at hand. From low to high, the Teradata Database tiers are:

Developer – Free software for application development
Base – Positioned for low concurrency, entry-level data warehouses
Advanced – Supports high-concurrency, production mixed workloads
Enterprise – Top-of-the-line offer with sophisticated workload management

Azure deployment is offered on multiple Virtual Machine (VM) types available in nearly every region globally, including DS15_v2 and DS14_v2 (Azure premium storage) and G5 and D15_v2 (local storage). There are also other analytical ecosystem components available, such as Teradata QueryGrid which enables you to pull and combine insights from multiple data repositories.

The table below shows the currently available options. Please see Teradata’s website for the latest configurations and software pricing.

Getting going with Teradata on Azure is easy. An Azure Marketplace Solution Template leads you through an intuitive step-by-step provisioning process and you can be up and running with an entire analytical ecosystem in about an hour. Here’s a screenshot illustrating the comprehensive guided deployment process:

Teradata Demand Chain Management on Azure

It’s no secret that many companies, particularly in retail and consumer goods, have aligned themselves with Azure as their public cloud provider of choice. An additional software as a service (SaaS) option from Teradata for the retail and consumer goods segments is Teradata Demand Chain Management (DCM), an application suite that provides forecasting, fulfillment, and demand chain analytics. 

Teradata DCM employs consumer demand data to develop daily and/or weekly sales forecasts of each item in multiple store locations based on historical performance with seasonal and causal identification. The forecast is then combined with inventory and fulfillment strategies which pull inventory through your supply chain based on expected sales across each location. The result is a reversal in the traditional supply chain flow of information, allowing store and SKU-level demand to serve its proper role at the peak of the pyramid.

Get started with Teradata on Azure today

Teradata brings powerful analytic capabilities to the Azure community. For existing Teradata customers, consistent software in Azure means that you can leverage investments you’ve already made. For anyone else, trying Teradata on Azure is an easy, low-risk way to determine whether it’s right for you. Try it today by deploying Teradata from Azure Marketplace.

To be secure-by-default, Teradata deployment does not automatically create public IP addresses for the VMs. After deployment, you can access the Teradata VMs from either a jumpbox VM that you already have in the same Virtual Network, via VPN/ExpressRoute, or by manually associating public IP addresses and specific Network Security Groups to the VMs you need to access such as Viewpoint, Data Mover, Data Stream Controller, Ecosystem Manager, or Server Management.

For additional information, see the Teradata on Azure Getting Started Guide.
Quelle: Azure