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What’s new in Azure Data, AI, and Digital Applications: Are you ready to go from GenAI experimentation to solutions deployed at scale?

For many organizations, implementing AI is not an “if” but a “when.” Determining the “when” piece depends on many factors, but one that may be tricky to scope is “when we are ready?.” Is it when your workloads are in the cloud? When your team has the skills? When it’s a good fit for your culture and customers? All of the above, and …?  

Prior to working at Microsoft, I was a Microsoft Systems Implementor (SI) partner implementing Microsoft Azure solutions. A big reason we were exclusive with Microsoft was the investment in tooling and expertise Microsoft makes to help customers assess their transformation readiness. Going back to our very beginning, Microsoft’s roots are in helping developers and organizations use technology to solve some of the world’s biggest opportunities and challenges. In this era of AI, we once again find ourselves seeking ways to empower our customers to adopt GenAI widely and at a pace not seen before in the technology industry. In fact, in a recent IDC study, we found that pace is a huge part of the GenAI equation. 

As someone who has been at a keyboard building software solutions, I can tell you—having enterprise-ready tooling and seamless integration into the broader cloud services needed to build applications is at the top of the list for delivering on time, with quality, no doubt about it.

We are now in the second year of the era of AI. The first year was full of excitement and experimentation, giving all of us a glimpse into the powerful potential of AI to revolutionize experiences for customers, improve employee productivity, and ignite a sense of wonder. The focus this year is on implementation, realizing value, and discovering where AI can take your organization. Read on for what’s new across the business, with a special focus on updates that will help ensure you’re ready for what’s next.

Whats new in AI readiness

Evaluate apps in Azure AI Studio before deploying

Ensuring an AI-powered app is ready to deploy means evaluating model accuracy and robustness, response quality, scalability, compliance, and other items critical to launching a successful app. With Azure AI Studio, generative AI app developers can build and evaluate applications for safety, reliability, and performance before deploying. If needed, they can fine-tune models and reorchestrate prompt application components. The platform facilitates scalability, transforming proof-of-concepts into full production with ease. And continuous monitoring and refinement supports long-term success. To get a look at this in action, watch our good friend Seth Juarez in this Microsoft Mechanics episode, “Build your own copilots with Azure AI Studio,” to see how evaluation is built into the workflow.

Calling all retailers! AI-ready data solutions in Microsoft Fabric now in public preview

In January we unveiled new generative AI and data solutions across the shopper journey, offering copilot experiences through Microsoft Cloud for Retail. A new retail industry data model can be used for data governance, reporting, business intelligence and advanced analytics. A data connector brings e-commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud into Microsoft Fabric in real time. Analytics templates, such as frequently bought together, provide actionable, data-driven recommendations to help retailers improve product upselling and shelf optimization. New copilot templates on Azure OpenAI Service allow retailers to build personalized shopping experiences and support store operations. Add to that new copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and the launch of Retail Media Creative Studio in the Microsoft Retail Media Platform and Microsoft Cloud for Retail now offers more options for retailers to choose from to infuse copilot experiences throughout the shopper journey. Learn more.

Advancing through the LLMOps Maturity Model: A roadmap for generative AI operational excellence 

The latest in our ongoing series on LLMOps for business leaders delves into how to use the LLMOps Maturity Model to methodically advance from theoretical to practical with powerful generative AI models. The LLMOps Maturity Model is not just a roadmap from foundational LLM utilization to mastery in deployment and operational management; it’s a strategic guide that underscores why understanding and implementing this model is essential for navigating the ever-evolving landscape of AI. This fourth blog in the series offers a practical roadmap for businesses to skillfully navigate the world of generative AI and Large Language Models. It’s all about moving from the basics of using LLMs to mastering deployment and management.

New Azure SQL Database Hyperscale pricing and Azure AI Search integration

AI applications need high-performance databases that can handle large volumes of data and complex queries. Azure SQL Database Hyperscale’s unique architecture provides the needed flexibility and scalability for AI-ready cloud applications of any size and I/O requirement. And new, reduced compute pricing gives you the performance and security of Azure SQL at commercial open-source prices. Learn more.

New, integrated vectorization capability in Azure AI Search means customers can now do vector search using data stored in Azure SQL Database. This new capability opens up new application scenarios for integrating vectors into traditional search as well as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Learn more.

Microsoft is a leader in the 2023 IDC MarketScape for AI Governance Platforms  

We are proud of the work we put into ensuring our AI products and services empower you to deploy solutions that are safe, responsible, and effective. So, we are honored to be recognized as a Leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape Worldwide AI Governance Platforms 2023 Vendor Assessment (doc #US50056923, November 2023). Learn more about this recognition.

Azure Partners: Faster app delivery, cost savings, and funding with Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate

Whether your customers are migrating to gain a secure and AI-ready foundation, modernizing their app portfolio, or are ready to build new intelligent apps, it is now easier to bring value to our mutual customers and help them capitalize on the technological innovations transforming every industry.

Achieve faster application delivery times, significant cost savings, and access funding through with Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate. Why is this so important to get ready for AI? You must get to the cloud before that innovation can begin!

Formerly the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, Azure Migrate and Modernize is an expanded offering for customer scenarios across apps, data, and infrastructure that includes support for more workloads, streamlined access to specialized partners, incentives to offset migration costs, and security guidance built into every engagement. Azure Innovate is a new offering focused on building new solutions and modernizing existing ones on Azure to meet the demand for AI transformation.

Both offerings provide end-to-end coverage of customer needs, from migration and modernization scenarios to AI innovation, and are built to scale as customer requirements and priorities evolve. Partners providing services, or ISVs building new or modernizing applications, have access to assessments, pilot PoCs, tooling, funding, and Microsoft expert guidance when you need it – all designed to help you accelerate the cloud journey and drive growth and impact.

Visit Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate for more info. 

Ready for the cloud and AI? Find out with a free Azure Expert Assessment

Looking for the best way to leverage the scale and compute horsepower of the cloud to optimize your IT infrastructure, data, and applications? Want a personal recommendation on that best way? For free? Check out Azure Expert Assessment, a one-to-one offer to collaborate with a Certified Azure Expert who will personally guide you through the assessment and make recommendations for your organization’s cloud adoption plan. You’ll get a clear technical roadmap and a comprehensive business case to support your cloud strategy. You will also get access to best practices, tools, and resources to help you implement your cloud solutions. Sound good? Go: Azure Expert Assessment.

Build your AI skills

Coming soon: Industry AI Implementation Workshops for partners

A new series of AI workshops to help partners implement industry-specific AI solutions is launching soon. The goal is to inform, educate, and accelerate our industry-specific partners on generative AI and equip them with what’s needed to go from concept to market. Workshop benefits include:

Architectural guidance supporting customer/partner adoption of our Generative AI stack (Azure OpenAI, Copilot, etc.)

An approach to Code ‘For’ / Code ‘With’ depending on the relationship

Offer feature requests/improvements to our horizontal platforms (Azure OpenAI, Copilot for M365, copilot for D365, etc.)

The Retail workshop is currently in pilot with Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Sustainability following soon. Stay updated on the Industry AI Workshops 

Workshop: Get started with Responsible AI

The Responsible AI framework helps AI developers identify and mitigate risks and harms that could impact people, businesses, and society. This hand-on workshop gives participants experience using Responsible AI to debug their machine learning model to improve the model’s performance to be more fair, inclusive, safe, reliable, and transparent. Learn more on the Responsible AI Framework.

Opportunities to connect

Register for the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Unifying data from across a sprawling infrastructure is critical to AI readiness. Microsoft Fabric helps you connect and curate data from anywhere and apply powerful analytics and share insights across your organization all while governing and protecting your data. Come see for yourself – join us at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas March 26-28and see firsthand how Fabric and the rest of our data and AI products can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. You’ll hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands on experiences with the latest features from Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure Databricks, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and so much more. Use discount code MSCUST to save $100 off. Register today. 

Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2024—Call for speakers

Azure Cosmos DB is the database for the era of AI and modern app development. From Chat GPT to TomTom Digital Cockpit—an immersive, conversational in-car infotainment system—Azure Cosmos DB powers responsive and intelligent apps with real-time data, ingested and processed at any scale.

There are many, many examples of developers building innovative apps with Azure Cosmos DB and if you’re one of them, we invite you to showcase your work at Azure Cosmos DB Conference 2024 on April 16. This free, virtual developer event is co-organized by Microsoft and the Azure Cosmos DB community. This year’s theme is “Building the next generation of AI Apps with Azure Cosmos DB.” We seek stories about customers using Azure Cosmos DB and AI to power next-gen intelligent apps, focusing on unique customer scenarios/use cases, and on integrating with open-source APIs like MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Apache Cassandra. Customer demo sessions showcasing innovative AI use cases will get priority. This call for speakers is open until Feb. 15. Get the details and submit a session.

AI era ready customers are making transformative moves

Walmart unveils new generative AI-powered capabilities for shoppers and associates

Microsoft and Walmart established a strategic partnership in 2018 that has accelerated innovation on several fronts. At CES Walmart unveiled that latest results of our ongoing collaboration: an all-new generative AI-powered search function that works across iOS, Android, and Walmart’s own website. The new capability is specifically designed to understand the context of a customer’s query and generate personalized responses. Soon, customers will have a more interactive and conversational experience, get answers to specific questions, and receive personalized product suggestions. Read the story.

Windstream uses Azure OpenAI Service to empower employees and transform business outcomes

Windstream, a leading telecommunications services provider in the U.S. was ready for the era of AI and has fully embraced it to revolutionize operations. From using Azure OpenAI Service to extract valuable insights from customer interactions and call transcripts to improve customer service, to using the service to analyze technical information and error codes and transform it into customer-friendly messages to inform users about issues and expected resolution times. Windstream also uses Azure AI, including cognitive search and OpenAI’s Davinci, to index their vast amount of internal social media data and documents, which included approximately 100,000 indexed documents on their Confluence wiki. This indexed data is made available to Windstream’s custom-built GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) platform, hosted within Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This allows employees to access indexed knowledge and answer questions, leading to increased efficiency and more informed decision-making. And that’s not all. Read more about Windstream’s AI story.

Ally Financial empowers customer service associates to focus on human engagement by using Azure OpenAI Service

Ally, a digital financial services firm, wanted to increase the time its call-center customer service associates have to spend with customers. Those associates had to write detailed notes after customer calls, taking time away from customers. To free up that time and maintain detailed call documentation, Ally used Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service to automate note-taking. Now associates can quickly review the AI-generated summary after each call and turn their attention back to serving customers. This solution cut associates’ post-call effort by 30 percent. As Ally improves call summary accuracy—which is over 85% to start—they expect to reduce associate post-call effort by 50%. Read more on Ally’s AI integration.

Microsoft and Cognite build industrial data operations platform on Microsoft Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service

Another partnership transforming industry with AI is our partnership with Cognite, which recently expanded to converge enterprise and industrial data operations to create a scalable, AI-driven platform that meets the demands of modern industries from the shop floor to the top floor. The solution integrates flagship Cognite Data Fusion with Microsoft Fabric to deliver a unified enterprise DataOps solution with capabilities for vertical industrial data workloads enabled through copilots. Customers can leverage Cognite Data Fusion for driving decisions in asset centric scenarios, for example asset performance optimization, and Fabric to generate insights to run their business. Read more on Cognite’s story.

How Microsoft’s AI screened over 32 million candidates to find a better battery—in 80 hours

In an awe-inspiring example of how AI can reshape our world, the Microsoft Quantum team used advanced AI to screen over 32 million candidates to discover and synthesize a new material that holds the potential for better batteries—the first real-life example of many that will be achieved in a new era of scientific discovery driven by AI. Joining forces with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the team accomplished in days something that would have taken traditional science and lab experimentation multiple lifespans to achieve. The discovery is important for many reasons. Solid-state batteries are safer than traditional liquid or gel-like lithium batteries and provide more energy density. Lithium is scarce, expensive, and environmentally and geopolitically problematic. Creating a battery that reduces lithium requirements by approximately 70% could have tremendous environmental, safety, and economic benefits. This achievement is a glimpse at how the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI is accelerating scientific discovery across industries. Microsoft puts the power these breakthroughs into customers’ hands with our Azure Quantum Elements platform. Read the AI breakthrough battery story.

Are you ready for the era of AI?

With an average return of $3.5 for every $1 invested and firms beginning to see returns in just 14 months, as reported by IDC,1 AI is rerouting technology roadmaps everywhere as the focus sharpens around when to deploy AI-powered solutions. The era of AI dramatically expands that next horizon and moves it much, much closer, accelerating transformation and value realization timelines.

If you are assessing your organization’s readiness milestones on a revised roadmap, include room for experimentation [the unknown?]. With AI, there’s what you want it to do, and in many cases, what more you realize it can do once you begin implementation. Not quite serendipity, but close.

Microsoft Azure was purpose built with your limitless innovation in mind. With the most comprehensive and responsible AI toolset in the market, the most advanced supercomputer in the world, and a team of the best and brightest on hand to help you plan and execute, Microsoft is the trusted partner to empower you to make the most of the AI era. 

IDC STUDY—The Business Opportunity of AI (microsoft.com) 

The post What’s new in Azure Data, AI, and Digital Applications: Are you ready to go from GenAI experimentation to solutions deployed at scale? appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

Reflecting on 2023—Azure Storage

The beginning of a new year often prompts reflection along with planning for the future. At the forefront of our priorities lies the commitment to enhance the Azure platform and its ecosystem, fuel groundbreaking AI solutions, and facilitate seamless migrations to the cloud. We achieve this through purpose-built storage solutions tailored to meet the unique demands of your workloads.

2023 was an emblematic year of growth for storage and data services with AI at the top of mind for many customers. Azure customers’ overall data estate continued to grow, powered by the emergence of new workloads and access patterns. Notable Azure Storage figures include:

The storage platform now processes more than 1 quadrillion (that’s 1000 trillion!) transactions a month with over 100 exabytes of data read and written each month. Both numbers were sharply higher compared to the beginning of 2023.

Premium SSD v2 disks, our new general-purpose block storage tailored for SQL, NoSQL databases, and SAP grew capacity by 100 times.

The total transactions of Premium Files, our file offering for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and SAP, grew by more than 100% year over year (YoY).

In 2023, advancements and investments were made in five strategic areas aligning with customer workload patterns, cloud computing trends, and the evolution of AI.

Focused innovations for new workloads

We’ve made advancements in offering end-to-end solutions with unique storage capabilities, tailored to help customers bring new workloads to Azure, without the need to retrofit them.

As customers modernize applications with Kubernetes, we have observed customers’ workloads moving from “stateless” to “stateful” workloads. Azure Container Storage is custom designed to meet the needs of hosting stateful workloads where storage is tightly integrated with containers and offers outstanding data management, lifecycle management, price-performance, and scale. Azure Container Storage is the industry’s first platform-managed container-native storage service in the public cloud. It offers a path to manage persistent volumes and the backend storage options completely via the Kubernetes native experience.

Microsoft’s Azure Elastic SAN is a fully managed storage area network (SAN) service that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN in the cloud. It is designed to address customers’ challenges in service management when it comes to migrating a large-scale SAN appliance to cloud. We are the first in the market in providing a fully managed SAN offering on cloud, with built-in cloud scale and high availability options. It adopts a SAN-like hierarchy, provisioning resources at the top-level resource, dynamically sharing resources across the workloads, managing security policies at the workload level. In addition, it enables customers to bring new data intensive workloads to Azure VMware Solution using Elastic SAN to serve the storage needs. Elastic SAN and Azure Container Storage, in public preview, showcase a paradigm shift by simplifying service management, purpose built for cloud native storage scenarios. General availability is planned for the upcoming months.

AI is leading a fresh wave of innovation powered by data. Azure Blob Storage stands at the forefront of this data explosion, providing excellent performance and high bandwidth access for all AI training needs. Azure Premium Block Blob, generally available since 2019, provides extremely low latency at competitive pricing for AI and machine learning (ML), IoT and streaming analytics, and interactive workloads. We also released Azure Managed Lustre in July which offers a fully managed distributed parallel file system tailored for high performance computing (HPC) and AI training workloads.

OneLake (which is the storage layer for Microsoft Fabric) is powered by the scale, performance, and rich capabilities of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). ADLS has been a game changer for analytics with differentiated storage features including native file system capabilities that enable atomic meta data operations, resulting in a significant performance boost, especially when used with Azure Premium Block Blob. Multi-protocol access is another unique capability that allows customers to work with their data using a variety of access protocols (including REST, SFTP and NFS v3) eliminating data silos, costly data movement, and duplication.

Optimizations for mission critical workloads

We continue to add differentiated capabilities to enable enterprises to optimize their mission critical workloads hosted on Azure.  

With the general availability of Premium SSD v2, we have been actively onboarding solutions focused on mission critical data. Gigaom highlighted the superior performance and reduced total cost of ownership of SQL Server 2019 running on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) with Premium SSD v2. Similar benefits apply to other database workloads like PostgreSQL. We will continue enhancing Premium SSD v2 capabilities and expand regional coverage in the upcoming year.

Azure Blob Storage powers data-intensive mission critical workloads globally, including some of the largest AI model training and inferencing. Cloud-native companies host exabytes of consumer-generated data and rely on the platform’s scale-out capabilities. Major retailers store trillions of user activities to power recommendation engines and inventory systems. The Cold storage tier, released in 2023, enables cost-efficient retention of this data.

Enterprises migrate Windows Server workloads to the cloud for modernization, supported by enhanced Azure Files and Azure File Sync capabilities. The preview of Microsoft Entra ID (previously named as Azure Active Directory support for Azure Files REST API) enables modern applications to use identity-based authentication and authorization for accessing SMB file shares. Azure Files offers comprehensive authentication support, including on-premises AD and Microsoft Entra ID for both Kerberos and REST. Unique to Azure, we also offer Microsoft Entra ID Kerberos authentication enabling seamless migration from on-premises Windows servers to Azure which keeps your data and permissions intact while eliminating complex domain join setups in the cloud. Enterprises migrating mission-critical applications such as SAP and Oracle rely on Azure NetApp Files (ANF) to meet their performance and data protection requirements.  In strategic partnership with NetApp, we introduced the public preview of ANF large volumes up to 500 TiB, addressing the needs of workloads that require larger capacity under a single namespace, such as HPC in Electronic Design Automation and Oil and Gas related applications, and the public preview of Cool Access, improving the TCO for infrequently accessed data.

Efficient data migration at scale is critical for successful cloud workload migration. We offer a comprehensive suite of migration solutions. Azure Storage Mover, a fully managed data migration service, improves the overall migration experience of large data sets. Azure File Sync allows hybrid synchronization between on-premises Windows Servers and Azure Files. AzCopy, a command-line utility, enables quick script-based migration jobs, while Azure Databox facilitates offline data transfer.

Expanding partner ecosystem

We transition customer workloads to Azure in collaboration with our partners, who complement our platform capabilities with innovative solutions. We have fostered numerous successful strategic partnerships and are delighted to see the partner community investing in exclusive Azure solutions.

Qumulo announced the next version of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service, exclusive to Azure and built to leverage Azure Blob Storage’s scale and cost efficiency. This service supports exabytes of data under a single namespace, surpassing other public cloud file solutions, and facilitates high-scale enterprise network attached storage (NAS) data migration to Azure.

Commvault unveiled a purpose-built cyber resilience solution, exclusively on Azure. It empowers users to predict threats faster, achieve clean recoveries, and accelerate response times. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.

Since the launch of Pure Storage Cloud Block Storage offering on Azure in 2021, we have partnered closely with Pure Storage. They use unique Azure Storage features such as shared disks and were early adopters of Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disk storage. Our collaboration has expanded to containers through Portworx and the Azure VMware Solution.

Besides storage and backup partners, we collaborate with Atempo, Data Dynamics, Komprise, and Cirrus Data to deliver storage migration solutions, providing access to industry-leading file and block solutions to migrate petabytes of NAS and storage area network (SAN) data to Azure at no additional charge.

Industry contributions

We actively participate in industry organizations such as Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Open Compute Platform (OCP), collaborating with industry leaders to share insights, influence standards, and contribute to the development of innovative solutions and best practices.

At the 2023 Storage Developer Conference, we presented Massively Scalable Storage for Stateful Containers on Azure, emphasizing the synergy between Azure Container Storage and Elastic SAN. This combination offers unified volume management across diverse storage backends and delivers a highly available block storage solution designed to scale to millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS) with fast pod attach and detach experience.

At Flash Memory Summit (FMS) conference we chartered the course for the future of flash as a HDD displacement technology in alignment with Azure Storage long-range plans.

We are committed to sustainability, striving for net carbon-zero goals in the next decade. Through the OCP Sustainability Project, we provide an open framework for the datacenter industry to adopt best practices for reusability and circularity and lead in the steering committee to drive progress.

Unparalleled commitment to quality

Our primary focus is on delivering a robust foundation for our storage services, adapting to evolving workloads like the emergence of AI and ML. This ongoing commitment covers reliability, durability, scalability, and performance, for our storage solutions while maintaining a low total cost of ownership (TCO) for Azure customers.

We assure customers of high data durability, backed by substantial investments in infrastructure, hardware, software, and streamlined processes. Our Zone-redundant Storage (ZRS) ensures data durability of at least 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) over a given year—the highest standard among the major cloud service providers (CSPs). Notably, we are the sole cloud provider among the major CSPs maintaining a 0% Annual Failure Rate (AFR) with our block storage offerings since launch.

Our unique ZRS offering provides a simple way to establish highly available solutions across three zones at a fraction of the costs. You can deploy a cross-zonal AKS cluster with persistent volumes hosted on ZRS disks to ensure data durability and availability during zonal outages. Clustered applications like SQL failover cluster instances (FCI) leveraging Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) can also benefit from ZRS with high resiliency provided out of the box.

In a concerted effort to elevate customer support experience, we’ve integrated with Azure Copilot, empowering support engineers to troubleshoot more efficiently while delivering quality responses quickly. This has resulted in a noteworthy increase in customer satisfaction scores.

In closing, 2023 has been a year of profound learning and substantial progress. Explore our feature releases in Azure Updates. Our commitment is to empower you with Azure Storage innovations and enable the seamless execution of a diverse range of workloads. We invite you to continue trusting us as we anticipate exciting developments in 2024!
The post Reflecting on 2023—Azure Storage appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure