Microsoft has introduced new offers and technologies that will help organisations navigate their own digital transformation and build the critical foundations for cloud and AI.
These include an expansion of the Azure Data Box offering. “Last year we introduced Azure Data Box, a secure, easy to manage appliance to help organisations overcome data transfer barriers that can block productivity and slow innovation,” says Jason Zander, executive vice-president of Microsoft Azure. “The response was overwhelmingly positive and we’re expanding availability of the Azure Data Box preview to new regions including Europe and the UK.
“Organisations can use the Data Box with partner solutions from CommVault, Veeam and others.
“The Azure Data Box family of products is also expanding to offer our customers even more options to get their data to Azure with the introduction of Azure Data Box Disk. The Data Box Disk is an SSD-disk based option to move data, no matter where it resides, into Azure with ease. It’s especially well-suited for data transfer from multiple remote branches or offices.
“Customers can order up to five 8Tb drives, totaling 40Tb, for a recurring or one-time data migration.”
The company has also expanded its Azure Global Network and introducing two new services: Azure Virtual WAN (wide-area network) and Azure Firewall both now available in preview.
Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service providing optimised and automated branch to branch connectivity that makes it easy to connect to and through Azure. Virtual WAN allows customers to seamlessly connect their branches to each other and Azure using last mile Internet enabling a distributed connectivity model.
It also enables customers to construct a hub and spoke network in Azure to more easily route traffic to virtual appliances such as firewalls and Azure network security services.
Azure Firewall is a cloud native network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability.
Customers can centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies, spanning Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs), IP Addresses, ports and protocols across subscriptions and virtual networks.
Microsoft has also unveiled a next-generation SQL Data Warehouse. “We’re continuing to invest in delivering the best platform for big data and analytics,” says Zander. “Starting today, Azure SQL Data Warehouse customers will enjoy at least two-times faster query performance from their workloads, cementing it as the fastest data warehouse in the cloud.
“This significant performance improvement is made real by new instant data movement capabilities that allows for extremely efficient movement between data warehouse compute nodes. At the heart of every distributed database system is the need to align two or more tables that are partitioned on a different key to produce a final or intermediate result set. The accelerated data movement results in faster query performance for customers.”
Azure SQL Data warehouse not only enables quick analytics on data, but also ensures that the insights are accessible across an organisation. The services has been enhanced to support 128 concurrent queries, so that more users can query the same database and not get blocked behind other requests.
Meanwhile, Power BI expands big data preparation and has introduced new enterprise capabilities.
New preview features beginning to appear in July include the ability to use the familiar Power Query experience to ingest, transform, integrate and enrich big data directly in the Power BI web service. The ingested data can be shared across multiple Power BI models, reports and dashboards.
Power BI will also support the common data model, while advanced capabilities from SQL Server Analysis Services are coming into Power BI, enabling incremental refresh, higher dataset size limits, and aggregates to allow customers to reach large dataset sizes, while maintaining fast and fluid reporting.
With end of support coming soon for Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/2008 R2, Microsoft is giving customers the option to migrate these workloads to Azure and receive extra critical security updates – at no additional charge.
“To make migrating to the cloud even easier for customers, Azure DB Managed Instance will be generally available in early Q4 of this calendar year,” Zander says. “Currently in preview, Database Managed Instance is a new flavor of Azure SQL Database that represents fully managed on-prem SQL Server Instance hosted in Azure cloud.”
Following on from earlier announcements about a $5-billion, four year investment in Internet of Things (IoT) and edge capabilities, Microsoft has launched new capabilities and programs to empower partners and customers to create connected solutions.
“Azure IoT Central, the industry’s first true SaaS IoT solution, is adding support for Power BI and Microsoft Flow – enabling customers to visualise realtime intelligence and create workflows to take action based on these insights,” says Zander. “These new capabilities will help customers and partners reduce costly scheduled maintenance by proactively detecting and resolving issues remotely.
“Azure IoT Central also now supports Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions, so CSP partners can easily provision and manage Azure IoT Central applications.”
Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure IoT Edge, an enterprise-ready and open edge platform, and has now added new programs: Azure Certified for IoT; and Azure Marketplace .
Azure mobile developers now have access to Visual Studio App Center, letting them effectively and efficiently distribute apps with the ability to visualise nuanced distribution metrics, and mark the release as mandatory for testers to update to the latest version.