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Azure SQL Database new premium performance level P15 generally available

We are excited to announce the general availability of our largest performance level P15, which offers 4000DTUs, more than two times the power than our current P11 offering. As customers build more powerful applications in Azure using Azure SQL Database, we see strong demand for high performance. P15 allows for extremely fast transactional processing and real-time analytics simultaneously and provides up to 1TB of storage.

The full spectrum of our premium offers now include:

With the introduction of P15, we support a broad range of high performance workloads, making SQL Database ideal for moving your on-premises apps to the cloud. You can have peace of mind knowing your database will scale as your application grows. With SQL Database, you can scale on-the-fly to or from P15 and instantly adapt to your changing workload demands when needed – all without application downtime.

Click the following links to:

Learn more about Azure SQL Database
Reference P15 pricing
Create your first P15 SQL Database

Quelle: Azure

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Microsoft obtains new cloud-centric ISO 27017 certification

We are happy to announce Microsoft Azure obtained the ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certification, an international standard that aligns with and complements the ISO/IEC 27002:2013 with an emphasis on cloud-specific threats and risks.

This certification provides guidance on 37 controls in ISO/IEC 27002 and features seven new controls not addressed in ISO/IEC 27002. Both cloud service providers and cloud service customers can leverage this guidance to effectively design and implement cloud computing information security controls. Customers can download the ISO/IEC 27017 certificate which demonstrates Microsoft’s continuous commitment to providing a secure and compliant cloud environment for our customers.

Microsoft Azure helps customers meet their compliance requirements across a broad range of regulated industries and markets including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, worldwide public sector, and US federal, state and local government.

For more information on Microsoft Azure’s unmatched compliance portfolio, visit the Trust Center.
Quelle: Azure

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GA for Azure AD authentication in SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse

Starting immediately, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication is generally available in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure AD provides an alternative to SQL Authentication enabling centralized identity and group management. It enables a single sign-on experience using SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse for federated domains. Azure AD can be used to authenticate against a growing number of Azure and other Microsoft services and helps customers prevent the proliferation of users and passwords. Other advantages include:

Greatly simplified permission management allowing customers to control database permissions via Azure AD groups without having to access any of the underlying databases.

Support for:

Azure AD managed and federated domains with user name/password. Password rotation is centralized and triggered automatically from Azure AD.

Integrated Windows Authentication for Azure AD federated domains and clients on domain-joined machines. This enables single sign-on across participating services. Integrated Windows authentication is also supported for remote connections using VPNs.

JSON Web Token (JWT) which allows you to perform Azure AD authentication for middle-tier applications against SQL Database (e.g., service accounts).

To use Azure AD Authentication, customers must configure an Azure AD administrator who can provision SQL contained users that are mapped to Azure AD identities. Creating an Azure AD administrator can be done via PowerShell, REST API, or the Azure portal.

The screenshot below shows an Azure portal AD administrator DBA representing an Azure AD group with rachelb@contososales.onmicrosoft.com  as its member having full server administrative access.

The next screen below shows an Azure AD SQL administrator (rachelb@contososales.onmicrosoft.com) connected to a SQL Database called ContosoSales. The sample T-SQL code in the query window on the right provisions a contained SQL user named SalesReps mapped to an Azure AD group also called SalesReps. As a result, all members of the AD group SalesReps (e.g., user joep@contososales.onmicrosoft.com shown in the connection window) will be able to connect to ContosoSales using their AD credentials (user name and password). Notice the new authentication option in SSMS called “Active Directory Password Authentication”.

Next steps:

Connecting to SQL Database or SQL Data Warehouse by Using Azure Active Directory Authentication

Azure AD Authentication GitHub Demo – Learn more about Azure AD authentication methods using the demo code samples.  

Quelle: Azure

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Microsoft: a Gartner cloud computing leader across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

CIOs no longer ask whether they should use cloud, but rather how. According to IDC, seventy percent of CIOs will embrace a cloud-first strategy in 2016. By partnering closely with customers around the world, we see the natural path to enterprise cloud adoption — starting with software services like email and collaboration, then moving to infrastructure for storage, compute and networking and finally embracing platform services to transform business agility and customer engagements. In this journey to adopt the cloud, customers are looking for a vendor who understands and leads in meeting the broad spectrum of their cloud needs.

Today, Gartner has named Microsoft a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for the third year in a row based on completeness of our vision and ability to execute. We are honored by this continued recognition as we are relentless about our commitment and rapid pace of innovation for infrastructure services. With the G series, Azure led with the largest VMs in the cloud and we continue to deliver market leading performance with our recent announcement supporting SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB. And while Azure is a world class cloud platform for Windows, it’s also recognized for industry-leading support for Linux and other open source technologies. Today, nearly one in three VMs deployed on Azure are Linux. Strong momentum for Linux and open source is driven by customers using Azure for business applications and modern application architectures, including containers and big data solutions. With over sixty percent of the 3,800 solutions in Azure Marketplace built on Linux, including popular open source images by Ubuntu, CoreOS, Bitnami, Oracle, DataStax, Red Hat and others, it’s exciting that many open source vendors considered Microsoft one of the best cloud partners.

While we are proud of our continued leadership in cloud infrastructure, we are committed to delivering the breadth and depth of cloud solutions to support our customers’ natural path to cloud adoption. Microsoft is the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. We are in a unique position with our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). And Microsoft’s cloud vision is a unified story that we’re executing on with the same datacenter regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings.

Many of our customers embrace Identity as a first step in moving to the cloud. Office 365 and Azure share the same identity system with Azure Active Directory therefore providing a simple, friction free experience for our customers. And with Office 365 commercial customers surpassing 70 million monthly active users, Azure adoption is quickly following suit. Once in Azure, customers tend to start with IaaS and then quickly extend to using both IaaS and PaaS models to optimize productivity and embrace new opportunities for business differentiation. Today fifty-five percent of Azure IaaS customers are also deploying PaaS.

The following table summarizes vendors in the leader quadrant across Gartner MQs for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for key enterprise cloud workloads.

The true power of Azure is enabling our customers and partners on their cloud journey to realize their unique business goals. Customers and partners like Fruit of the Loom and Boomerang demonstrate this common need and cloud adoption path from Software as a Service (SaaS) to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Fruit of the Loom: Office 365 was their “runway” to Azure. Success with Office 365 deployment has led to use of Azure infrastructure and its platform services as they moved their consumer-facing website fruit.com to Azure. To gain insight into how they should market and package their products, Fruit of the Loom is also leveraging platform services such as Azure Machine Learning.
Boomerang: An Office 365 ISV takes advantage of Azure to create productivity solutions within Outlook. A key feature for Boomerang is its ability to generate real-time calendar images that are shareable with people outside of the user’s organization. Boomerang relies on Azure’s enterprise-proven infrastructure to support this computationally demanding workload. Their experience with Office 365 led them to look more closely at Azure, and they have started to migrate services from AWS to Azure to leverage Azure’s platform services and Machine Learning capabilities.

We look forward to delivering more on this vision across our portfolio of cloud offerings to our customers and partners. If you’d like to read the full report, “Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service,” you can request it here.

 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Quelle: Azure

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Azure N-Series preview availability

Today we’re delighted to announce that Azure N-Series Virtual Machines, the fastest GPUs in the public cloud, are now available in preview. N-Series instances are enabled with NVIDIA’s cutting edge GPUs to allow you to run GPU-accelerated workloads and visualize them. These powerful sizes come with the agility you have come to expect from Azure, paying per-minute of usage.

Our N-Series VMs are split into two categories. With the NC-Series (compute-focused GPUs), you will be able to run compute intensive HPC workloads using CUDA or OpenCL. This SKU is powered by Tesla K80 GPUs and offers the fastest computational GPU available in the public cloud. Furthermore, unlike other providers, these new SKUs expose the GPUs through discreet device assignment (DDA) which results in close to bare-metal performance. You can now crunch through data much faster with CUDA across many scenarios including energy exploration applications, crash simulations, ray traced rendering, deep learning and more. The Tesla K80 delivers 4992 CUDA cores with a dual-GPU design, up to 2.91 Teraflops of double-precision and up to 8.93 Teraflops of single-precision performance. Following are the Tesla K80 GPU sizes available:

 

NC6

NC12

NC24

Cores

6

(E5-2690v3)

12

(E5-2690v3)

24

(E5-2690v3)

GPU

1 x K80 GPU (1/2 Physical Card)

2 x K80 GPU (1 Physical Card)

4 x K80 GPU (2 Physical Cards)

Memory

56 GB

112 GB

224 GB

Disk

380 GB SSD

680 GB SSD

1.44 TB SSD

In addition to the NC-Series, focused on compute, the NV-Series is focused more on visualization. Data movement has traditionally been a challenge with HPC scenarios using large datasets produced in the cloud. With the Azure NV-Series, you’ll be able to use Tesla M60 GPUs and NVIDIA GRID in Azure for desktop accelerated applications and virtual desktops. With these powerful visualization GPUs in Azure, you will be able to visualize graphic-intensive workflows to get superior graphics capability and run single precision workloads such as encoding and rendering. The Tesla M60 delivers 4096 CUDA cores in a dual-GPU design with up to 36 streams of 1080p H.264. Following are the Tesla M60 GPU Sizes available:

 

NV6

NV12

NV24

Cores

6

(E5-2690v3)

12

(E5-2690v3)

24

(E5-2690v3)

GPU

1 x M60 GPU (1/2 Physical Card)

2 x M60 GPU (1 Physical Card)

4 x M60 GPU (2 Physical Cards)

Memory

56 GB

112 GB

224 GB

Disk

380 GB SSD

680 GB SSD

1.44 TB SSD

We’ve partnered with NVIDIA to deliver these capabilities in Azure including making sure the virtual machines are optimized to deliver the highest possible performance.

“Azure N-Series now makes GPU computing accessible for modern day Da Vincis, Curies and Einsteins to solve the world’s hardest problems. With over 400 industry applications accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs, Microsoft and NVIDIA are serving the world's most demanding users and powering amazing experiences in simulation, artificial intelligence, professional visualization.” – Ian Buck, VP of accelerated computing, NVIDIA

This preview offers the first public cloud support for this bleeding edge of specialized hardware. One of our release partners Teradici has been validating their PCoIP technology on these instances with fantastic results. In fact, with this preview, you will be able to utilize Teradici’s cutting edge protocol for VDI type scenarios including running desktop accelerated applications such as AutoCAD and Adobe Premier Pro.

“We’re thrilled that Microsoft has chosen our trusted, industry-leading Teradici PCoIP technology for its new N-Series instances in the Azure cloud,” said Dan Cordingley, CEO, Teradici. “The combination of PCoIP and Azure N-Series VMs is a winning formula that’s been optimized to deliver flawless user experiences from the cloud, complete with lossless imaging and 100 percent color accuracy. Now, as the visualization layer for Azure N-Series, PCoIP is helping customers further their digital transformation by enabling unprecedented collaboration on cloud datasets and graphically rich applications across multiple geographic regions, complete with the battle-hardened security of a fully encrypted pixel stream.”

Additionally, the technology will enable you to visualize your simulations in real time on Azure including having the ability to modify models and simulate them real time in Azure. This really closes the loop on “true HPC in the cloud” and allows customers to run their entire infrastructure and pipeline in Azure.

We’ve been working with various early adopters including BAFTA and Emmy award-winning studio in London Jellyfish Pictures. They have over 100 artists in London and additional artists across various geographies. They currently face a couple of challenges like remote artists having access to desktop accelerated applications whenever they’re not in the studio. Additionally, they’re currently rendering on CPU based virtual machines in Azure but with 4K and 8K on the horizon they have the need to render using GPU based rendering engines to not only cut their rendering times multiple fold but also get better results.

With Azure N-Series Jellyfish Picture’s artists are able to utilize the NV instances to run GPU and GRID accelerated applications such as Autodesk Maya. In addition, they’re able to speed up their rendering times by five times, utilizing the NC instances for CUDA based ray-tracing engines such as Octane and Redshift. This allows the studio to be more efficient and productive by focusing on their business value, which is producing and delivering cutting edge visual effects and simulations.

“By using Azure, we can scale dynamically to our production needs on demand. When using our on-premise we can run in a seamless hybrid model allowing us to fill in the gap when our current infrastructure isn’t sufficient. What makes this a really exciting offering is that this applies to both CPU and GPU based solutions. The result is that production deadlines are met without ever over provisioning.” – Jeremy Smith, CTO, Jellyfish Pictures

These customer scenarios are exactly what we hope to solve with this new offering. The preview will start in South Central region initially and will expand to additional regions in the next couple of months as we approach General Availability before the end of the year.

We encourage you to register your interest in the preview. To learn more about the technology and use cases for N-Series, check out our recent Channel 9 video. Pricing information can be found on the Virtual Machines pricing page.

We’re extremely excited to get our newest member of virtual machines in your hands and cannot wait to see what new use cases and scenarios they’re able to solve with GPUs in Azure.
Quelle: Azure