What's New in MS Azure

    Microsoft has always been distinguished by the regularity and dynamics of updating its product lines. Cloud technology, as a priority, naturally preserved these traditions. In addition, by announcing new functionality in the clouds, you can not be tied to time periods, scheduled builds, etc., which unties the hands of both the vendor itself and the partner companies for which the Azure platform has become a development driver. In this article, I will talk about the new products of the platform itself, as well as partner companies that have been released since the beginning of the year, consider what they talked about at the WPC (Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference), and what awaits us in the near future.



    Azure now


    Today, the Azure platform is available almost worldwide - in 140 countries. It supports 10 of the most common languages ​​and 24 currencies. Azure services are now available in 26 regions around the world. In the near future it is planned to ensure accessibility in 8 additional regions. Expanding our geography is a priority for Azure, as it allows customers to achieve better performance and also support the requirements and preferences of customers regardless of the location of the data. Now in Europe, Azure services are available in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

    One of the breakthroughs was the platform’s entry into the Chinese market. This happened thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet (China's largest Internet service provider). Acquired and managed by 21Vianet, the Azure platform provides users with reliable, convenient, and cost-effective cloud computing technologies. Thus, Microsoft is the first global company that made public cloud services in the Middle Kingdom.


    Microsoft has also invested $ 15 billion in the global data center infrastructure for the Azure platform. Thanks to this, customers can use the worldwide data center network as a cost-effective way to ensure accessibility. During the first subscription, you can enable two options for data replication - local and geo-redundant. When using locally redundant storage (LRS), data is stored locally in the user's primary region. In the case of using geo-redundant storage (GRS), the data is stored in an additional region located at a distance of more than 400 km, but within the same territory.

    Another area of ​​focus for Microsoft is environmental care. So in 2014, the corporation achieved a neutral level of carbon emissions, and also reached an average energy consumption (PUE) of 1.125 compared to industry data centers, for which this coefficient is 1.7.

    What's New: WPC Update


    This year, the annual global partner conference Microsoft WPC 2016, now held in Toronto (Canada), brought together more than 16,000 participants from around the world using the company's software in their technology solutions.

    The main topic of the conference was the “technological transformation” of the business and the use of innovations to increase the productivity and efficiency of enterprises. So, according to IDC research, business partners who have more than 50% of their revenue in the cloud grow twice as fast, receive 1.5 times more gross profit and receive 1.8 times more extra income than business partners which the cloud accounts for less than 50% of revenue. Microsoft also announced that members of the company's partner channel receive almost 20% more profit (aka.ms/channelprofit) than partners of other vendors.

    At the conference, the company's experts spoke in detail about the new Microsoft services for business - Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft AppSource store, which will be available this fall. Microsoft Dynamics 365 service will provide companies with a complete solution by combining cloud CRM and ERP systems. Using the solution, companies will be able to manage marketing, financial and operational processes, set up a sales system and customer interaction schemes. Microsoft AppSource will become an innovative platform where companies can purchase cloud-based SaaS applications from Microsoft and its partners, taking into account individual business needs.

    These and other Microsoft products are mainly aimed at industries such as IT and software development, distribution, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government agencies, etc. And the main partners of Microsoft are system integrators, independent software developers, distributors, etc. .


    Windows as with the a the Service

    Today, the operating system Windows 10 installed on more than 350 million devices, and more than 96% Microsoft corporate clients actively use it. According to a Forrester study, customers report increased productivity and lower costs, as well as an increase in payback of up to 188% in the first 13 months of use.

    To help more corporate customers take advantage of the new operating system, Microsoft has announced a new Windows 10 Enterprise E3 subscription plan. It will be available in the fall through partners-providers of corporate services. This subscription format is an ideal solution for companies that have a limited staff of IT specialists or do not have dedicated IT resources, but at the same time there is a need for high-quality maintenance of licensed programs and services. It can be provided by an experienced and reliable partner.

    The Cloud Solution Provider is one of Microsoft's strongest areas. Over the past year, around 17,000 partners worldwide have gained the competence of a cloud solution provider. They can now ship Windows 10 as a SaaS subscription service in conjunction with Office 365 business tools, Microsoft Azure Cloud, and CRM.

    LinkedIn deal

    Buying Microsoft LinkedIn for $ 26.2 billion has many implications for partners. This issue was not particularly discussed from the main stage, but certainly generated a lot of talk in the corridors and around the dining tables.

    In general, Microsoft partners enthusiastically accepted the news of the third largest merger in US history. They note that using LinkedIn data will improve almost all Microsoft services - Outlook, Excel, Skype, PowerPoint, Word, SharePoint, and will also find application in Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 in general. For example, looking at a contact in one of these programs, the user will be able to see everything that this contact indicated in his LinkedIn profile, and not just a nickname and other bits of data, as is often the case now. In addition, deeper integration is likely. For example, when your LinkedIn profile becomes your primary user account in Office, Skype, or Windows.

    For partners, all this will mean new opportunities and new tools that they can offer their customers. And despite the fact that LinkedIn also has its problems (this is a slowdown in the number of unique visitors, a decrease in advertising volumes, a decrease in the value of shares, etc.), they are confident that integration will benefit everyone - both companies and partners, and end users.

    New Azure stack The

    basic capabilities for running Azure in a local data center appeared several years ago. The new Azure stack has many more options for working with the Microsoft public cloud, which will provide many new opportunities for partners. What does the new Azure stack offer?

    The product is primarily aimed at large companies that usually buy dozens of servers at the same time. For such companies, Azure Stack will replace the need to build the infrastructure on their own, providing a turnkey solution.

    Typically, customers put forward several basic service requirements. For starters, they don’t want to deal with the complexity of deployment and operation, but prefer to focus on working with applications and new features. This is stated by analysts in many studies. Customers also want to receive affordable Azure services and tools as soon as they appear and be aware of all the latest innovations. They are ready to sacrifice some configuration options at the infrastructure level in order to quickly get new tools that they can use in their work. They also need the quality and reliability of the system. That is a solution that "just works." And not only after the sweep, but also as new updates appear.

    To meet these needs, the Azure stack will be delivered as turnkey integrated systems combining software, hardware, support and service in one solution. Microsoft and partners will be able to provide high quality services throughout the entire cycle of their provision (during deployment, adding new services and tools, updates, etc.) thanks to a specially developed management system for the entire stack.

    Microsoft is committed to ensuring that partners and customers have a flexible choice of equipment. To do this, the corporation collaborates with manufacturers such as Dell, HPE, Lenovo - with their participation, integrated systems for production environments are created. From mid-2017, Microsoft is going to release integrated systems with Azure Stack together with these partners. And in the more distant future, expand their list.

    Thus, thanks to these changes, customers will be able to improve their work in the cloud, namely:

    - Use Azure services to develop their own applications immediately;

    - Gain experience in a single environment, which was introduced in Azure Stack TP1, and will be presented in future versions. This will allow you to learn much faster with new versions of the system (the next one will be presented later this year) and save time on training;

    - Save your investment in Microsoft Cloud Platform Solution (CPS). The fact is that now to deploy a private cloud based on Azure, you need to purchase the Cloud Platform Solution system. Customers will now be able to use Azure Stack to manage CPS resources. Read

    more about Azure Stack on the Microsoft portal .

    New Features and Products for Azure


    Azure is constantly being improved by Microsoft. And other companies offer their own products that integrate with the platform and provide customers with new opportunities.

    Replicating virtual and physical machines in Azure

    Azure now has the ability to replicate local VMware virtual machines or physical Windows or Linux servers in Azure using Azure Site Recovery. In this case, the user has two deployment models for creating and working with resources: the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model and the classic model. In addition, Azure provides two portals - the classic Azure portal, which supports the classic deployment model, and the Azure portal, which supports both deployment models. With Site Recovery on the Azure portal, you can:

    Site Recovery on the Azure portal provides many new features:

    - Azure Backup Service and Azure Site Recovery Services are combined in a single repository of recovery services. In this way, you can set up business continuity and disaster recovery and manage these features from one place. In a single dashboard, you can monitor and manage operations between on-premises sites and the Azure public cloud.

    “Now users with Azure subscriptions who are prepared to work as part of the program for cloud solution providers have the opportunity to manage Site Recovery operations on the Azure portal.
    - Using the Site Recovery service on the Azure portal, you can replicate computers to ARM storage accounts. When failover, Site Recovery creates ARM-based virtual machines in Azure.

    - Site Recovery still supports replication to classic storage accounts. When failover, Site Recovery creates virtual machines using the classic model.

    For enterprises, the benefits of using this tool are as follows:

    - Site Recovery provides remote protection for corporate workloads and applications running on VMware virtual machines and physical servers.

    - The Recovery Services Portal provides a single location for configuring, monitoring, and controlling replication, failover, and recovery.

    - Site Recovery is able to automatically detect VMware virtual machines, adding to vSphere nodes.

    - Azure Site Recovery allows you to perform simple failover from the local infrastructure to Azure and restore placement (recovery) with the transfer from Azure to the VMware virtual machine servers on the local site.

    - You can enable the deployment of multiple virtual machines and create replication groups so that application workloads distributed between multiple computers are replicated at the same time. All computers in the replication group have fault tolerant and consistent failover points. For failover, you can combine several computers into recovery plans at once so that failover is performed for the entire distributed workload. Read

    more about replication of virtual machines and servers on the Microsoft portal .

    Azure Resource Manager Integration in Citrix Cloud

    A few months ago, the Citrix Cloud solution using the capabilities of Azure VPN was available only in the classic Azure mode of operation. Now there is Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which is the native resource allocation tool for this platform. Thus, Citrix Cloud XenApp became the first integrated tool with ARM, the use of which greatly facilitates the hybrid deployment of resources in the Citrix cloud. You can do this in just a few steps, a detailed description of the process can be found here .

    Check Point vSEC for Azure

    Check Point Software Technologies introduced its popular Vsec security system for Microsoft Azure. It aims to provide reliable protection in the Azure cloud infrastructure, prevent network attacks and data leakage, and also provides a secure connection to Azure in public cloud environments. The system provides comprehensive prevention from a variety of threats to the Microsoft Azure cloud and provides a secure connection for users, including those who use mobile devices in their work. There is also reliable protection against malicious software and the so-called zero-day threats - the latest viruses and trojans that have not yet been included in anti-virus databases. In addition, the company provides personal protective equipment tailored to the needs of a particular business. Among these tools are a firewall, anetivirus, antispam, antibot, means to prevent data loss and work with VPN. To manage these funds, a centralized proprietary solution is provided that is suitable for both working in the cloud and for use on your own infrastructure.

    Deploying vSEC protection is very fast. This procedure takes place literally at the touch of a button and does not require any specific knowledge or the involvement of third-party specialists. The system can be purchased in two models: for permanent (for an agreed period) and temporary use. In the second case, the customer pays directly for the time that the system is active on its equipment. In this case, charging is hourly.

    NetApp Private Storage for Azure

    NetApp introduced its hybrid storage system for Microsoft Azure. It is called NetApp Private Storage and combines the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a public cloud with the performance, availability and security of specialized enterprise-class storage systems. Using this system, information is placed in one of the world's largest data centers Equinix with a security level of Tier 1. This guarantees the protection of data at the physical level, as well as against a variety of cyber threats.

    Another plus of this system is its high performance. It is achieved through Azure ExpressRoute technology. Using it to connect NetApp storage to an Azure environment increases throughput by 36% compared to VPNs and the Internet.

    With NetApp Private Storage, users can work with multi-cloud environments and move data between cloud service provider environments. Microsoft System Center and the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit provide the ability to manage and transfer data between the private cloud and your private storage connected to Azure.

    Prospects and announcements


    To track new platform products that will be released in the near future, MS has created a special resource . Of the main and expected new products, we want to note the following:

    - The advent of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5. Already the first technical previews of this product received many positive reviews thanks to several innovative features and tools. This is, for example, a new server installation option called Nano Server - a version of Windows Server for working without a monitor. Or support for Docker, a mechanism for building and managing containers that was originally developed under Linux. The platform also provides server virtualization capabilities, software-based storage and networking, server automation and management, work with web and application platforms, access and information protection, as well as work with virtual desktop infrastructure and much more.

    In the fifth Technical Preview, overall improvements were mostly made. So, the system began to work more accurately over time in physical and virtual machines, container support on Windows 10 improved, network management was simplified, the Nano Server imaging module was updated, the recovery console was improved (including the separation of incoming and outgoing firewall rules, as well as the ability to restore WinRM configuration). In working with virtual machines, Encryption Supported mode has appeared. It offers more protection than in normal mode with a virtual machine, but less than in protected Shielded mode, etc.

    - System Center 2016. Microsoft System Center is a product designed to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of a virtualized software-defined infrastructure for data centers and hybrid clouds running on Windows Server 2016. System Center 2016 is also designed to provide broader support for heterogeneous environments, including stack monitoring LAMP and massive improvements in UNIX / Linux monitoring. And finally, System Center 2016 will provide built-in integration with Microsoft Management Operations Suite (OMS) - a set of cloud services that complement and expand the functionality of System Center.

    There are many useful tools in System Center 2016 for all this. So, Virtual Machine Manager allows you to allocate clusters for data storage and computing on physical servers, control the incoming and outgoing traffic of virtual machines using port access control lists, and create secure virtual machines using Windows Azure Pack (WAP). System Center Operations Manager 2016 allows you to increase the coverage of monitoring infrastructure and applications in private and public clouds, as well as provide better support for Linux environments and integration with the Operations Management Suite, which provides more comprehensive analytics and improved diagnostics. System Center Configuration Manager provides a single management console with an automated set of tools for software deployment, data protection and server health monitoring. And System Center Orchestrator and Service Management Automation will help automate everyday tasks, such as testing and debugging equipment.

    Read more about System Center 2016 on the Microsoft portal .

    - Preview of Azure Public DNS . This tool allows you to host your DNS domain in Azure, so users can now manage DNS records using the same credentials as billing in Azure. The global network of name servers uses Anycast routing to provide high performance and availability. Read

    more about Azure Public DNS on the Microsoft portal .

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