While Apple is busy with its WWDC announcements today, which has seen the announcements of many improvements in its operating systems, Microsoft has some news of its own to share, regarding its Azure cloud service.
In a blog post today, Corey Sanders announced a range of improvements coming to Microsoft's cloud offerings. These include new M-series Virtual Machines with up to 12TB of memory on a single VM, but also new options on the cheaper side, such as new VM sizes with just 192GB of memory.
Additionally, the company now also offers Standard SSDs in addition to its Premium offerings, which offer slightly slower performance for a lower price. These should still, however, be much faster than the Standard HDDs option. Here's the full list of upcoming improvements:
- Industry leading M-series VM sizes offering memory up to 12 TB on a single VM, the largest memory for a single VM in the public cloud for in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA. With these larger VM configurations, we are not only advancing the limits of virtualization in the cloud but also the performance of SAP HANA on VMs. These new sizes will be based on Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors, with more details available in the coming months.
- Newer M-series VM sizes with memory as low as 192 GB, extending M-series VM range from 192 GB to 4 TB in RAM, available now, enabling fast scale-up and scale-down with 10 different size choices. M-series VMs are certified for SAP HANA and available worldwide in 12 regions. Using Azure ARM template automation scripts for SAP HANA, you can deploy entire SAP HANA environments in just minutes compared to weeks on-premises.
- New SAP HANA TDIv5 optimized configurations for SAP HANA availability on Azure Large Instances with memory sizes of 6 TB, 12 TB, 18 TB. In addition to this, we now offer the industry-leading public cloud instance scale for SAP HANA with our new 24TB TDIv5 configuration. This extends our purpose-built SAP HANA offering to 15 different instance choices. With these new configurations, you can benefit from a lower price for TDIv5 configuration with an unparalleled 99.99% SLA for SAP HANA infrastructure and the ability to step up to larger configurations.
- New Standard SSDs provide a low-cost SSD-based Azure Disk solution, optimized for test and entry-level production workloads requiring consistent performance and high throughput. You will experience improved latency, reliability and scalability as compared to Standard HDDs. Standard SSDs can be easily upgraded to Premium SSDs for more demanding and latency-sensitive enterprise workloads. Standard SSDs come with the same industry leading durability and availability that our clients expect from Azure Disks.
Microsoft is also making improvements to the built-in security and management tools in Azure, including disaster recovery for Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service VMs and backup support for SQL in Azure Virtual Machines in preview form:
- Disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines general availability: You likely need disaster recovery capabilities to ensure your applications are compliant with regulations that require a business continuity plan (such as ISO27001). You also may need your application to run continuously in the unlikely event of a natural disaster that could impact an entire region. With the general availability of this new service, you can configure disaster recovery within minutes, not days or weeks, with a built-in disaster recovery as a service that is unique to Azure. Learn more about how to get started by visiting our documentation.
- Azure Backup for SQL in Azure Virtual Machines preview: Today we are extending the Azure backup capability beyond virtual machines and files to also include backup of a SQL instance running on a VM. This is a zero-infrastructure backup service that provides freedom from managing backups scripts, agents, backup servers or even backup storage. Moreover, customers can perform SQL log backups with 15-minute intervals on SQL Servers and SQL Always On Availability groups. Learn more on the key benefits of this capability and how to get started.
- VM Run command: Customers can easily run scripts on an Azure VM directly from the Azure portal without having to connect to the machine. You can run either PowerShell scripts or Bash scripts and you can even troubleshoot a machine that has lost connection to the network. Learn more about Run Command for Windows and Linux.
In addition to all these improvements, Microsoft has also announced the extended availability of the Azure Stack, which will now be available in 92 countries. The full list of supported countries can be found here.
Source: Microsoft via TechCrunch
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