Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have partnered to facilitate hybrid cloud computing within the enterprise by means of hardware provided by HPE that enables enterprises to deploy and manage Azure-based private clouds. The cornerstone of the collaboration between Microsoft and HPE features the HPE Hyper-Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System Standard appliance, a hyper-converged infrastructure that empowers customers to deploy Windows and Linux-based workloads onto the Azure cloud. The appliance also features an integrated management console that provides insight into the performance of their Azure deployment. HPE will provide assistance with support for hardware and software to accelerate deployment cycles and ensure customers can expeditiously deploy and manage an Azure-based private cloud based on infrastructure within their data centers alongside their public cloud-based Azure deployments. The partnership designates Azure as HP’s preferred public cloud partners whereas correspondingly, Azure designates HP its preferred infrastructure partner for hybrid clouds. The collaboration between HPE and Microsoft underscores the acumen behind Microsoft’s strategic vision for bringing Azure to the enterprise and leveraging its long-standing relationships with enterprise customers to take command of the leadership position in the critical arena of hybrid cloud deployment and management.
Category: Microsoft Azure
ActiveState Partners With Microsoft To Render Stackato PaaS Available On Azure
On Tuesday, ActiveState announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure that renders the Stackato Platform as a Service available on Azure. Built on Cloud Foundry, Stackato PaaS supports Docker and integrates with a multitude of third party products such as New Relic, Splunk and various database platforms. Stackato’s enterprise-grade PaaS platform enhances the operational agility of developers by delivering a pre-configured, polyglot application development stack based on the open source Cloud Foundry platform. Stackato’s enterprise-grade security and professional services offerings allows customers to leverage the benefits of an open source platform derived from the contributions of developers all over the world, in conjunction with enterprise-grade user management and security functionality. Moreover, Stackato’s support for Docker renders it ideal for the development of distributed applications marked by enhanced portability both at the level of individual and multiple containers. ActiveState’s partnership with Microsoft Azure marks a coup for Stackato given that it is now available on one of the industry’s most popular IaaS platforms. Conversely, Stackato’s availability on Microsoft Azure represents yet another feather in Azure’s cap and a differentiator from Amazon Web Services, which offers only one PaaS on its IaaS platform in the form of Elastic Beanstalk. Azure already features Apprenda as another enterprise-grade PaaS on its platform in a clear sign that it intends to continue to differentiate itself from AWS by supporting a wider range of vendors and third party partnerships. With Apprenda and ActiveState Stackato available on its platform, Azure stands poised to brand itself as the IaaS with the richest set of partnership offerings, particularly in the PaaS space where IaaS and PaaS partnerships continue to proliferate as evinced by the forthcoming availability of both ActiveState Stackato and Apprenda on the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace. Meanwhile, Stackato’s Cloud Foundry-based polyglot PaaS functionality and support for Docker renders it a leader in enterprise PaaS that promises to broaden its reach further by means of its collaboration with Azure.
AWS and Microsoft Azure Named As Two Leaders In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant For Global Cloud, IaaS
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure took the two leadership positions in its latest Magic Quadrant report for Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. Amazon is the clear market leader and, according to Gartner, claims more than 10 times the computing capacity of the other 14 vendors represented in its Magic Quadrant report. Other vendors represented in the report include Google, Rackspace, IBM SoftLayer and VMware vCloud Air. Gartner estimates that the IaaS space will experience growth of 33% in 2015 and become a $16.5B market globally with an annual growth rate of 29.1% through 2019. In a press release about the report, Gartner noted that “the market for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is in a state of upheaval, as many service providers are shifting their strategies after failing to gain enough market traction.” The report’s finding that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure represent the two market leaders means that the rest of the space will need to significantly differentiate their product offerings to flourish in an increasingly competitive space.
Equinix Cloud Exchange Delivers Direct Access To Microsoft Office 365 Via Azure ExpressRoute
Equinix recently announced that its Equinix Cloud Exchange platform will support private, managed connectivity to Microsoft Office 365 by way of Azure ExpressRoute, the infrastructure that provides a direct connection to Microsoft Azure that bypasses the public internet. As of Q3 of this year, Equinix will become one of the first vendors to deliver a private, reliable, low latency, high performance connection to Microsoft Office 365 via its Equinix Cloud Exchange. Equinix’s support of a direct connection to Microsoft Office 365 gives enterprises the valuable option of ensuring that their employees have access to the Office 365 productivity suite of applications with minimal downtime, latency-related interruptions or performance issues. By providing access to Microsoft Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute, Equinix enhances the cloud security of data leveraged by Office 365 because of its private, non-public internet connection. Equinix’s direct access to Office 365 will be available in 15 markets worldwide including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Osaka, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. One of the additional benefits of the Equinix Cloud Exchange’s direct access offering to Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute is the ability of customers to modulate network performance to ensure high speed, secure access to Office 365 while concomitantly taking advantage of recent security upgrades to the Azure ExpressRoute infrastructure.
Microsoft Announces Azure Data Lake With Unlimited Storage For Enterprise-Wide Data
Microsoft Azure recently announced news of the Azure Data Lake, a product that serves as a repository for “every type of data collected in a single place prior to any formal definition of requirements or schema.” As noted by Oliver Chiu in a blog post, Data Lakes allow organizations to store all data types regardless of data type and size on the theory that they can subsequently use advanced analytics to determine which data sources should be transferred to a data warehouse for more rigorous data profiling, processing and analytics. The Azure Data Lake’s compatibility with HDFS means that products with data stored in Azure HDInsight and infrastructures that use distributions such as Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR can integrate with it, thereby allowing them to feed the Azure Data Lake with streams of Hadoop data from internal and third party data sources as necessary. Moreover, the Azure Data Lake supports massively parallel queries that allow for the execution of advanced analytics on massive datasets of the type envisioned for the Azure Data Lake, particularly given its ability to support unlimited data both in aggregate, and with respect to specific files as well. Built for the cloud, the Azure Data Lake gives enterprises a preliminary solution to the problem of architecting an enterprise data warehouse by providing a repository for all data that customers can subsequently use as a base platform from which to retrieve and curate data of interest.
The Azure Data Lake illustrates the way in which the economics of cloud storage redefines the challenges associated with creating an enterprise data warehouse by shifting the focus of enterprise data management away from master data management and data cleansing toward advanced analytics that can query and aggregate data as needed, thereby absolving organizations of the need to create elaborate structures for storing data. In much the same way that Gmail dispenses with files and folders for email storage and depends upon its search functionality to facilitate the retrieval of email-based data, data lakes take the burden of classifying and curating data away from customers but correspondingly place the emphasis on the analytic capabilities of organizations with respect to the ability to query and aggregate data. As such, the commercial success of the Azure Data Lake hinges on its ability to simplify the process of running ad hoc and repeatable analytics on data stored within its purview by giving customers a rich visual user interface and platform for constructing and refining analytic queries on Big Data.
Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Facilitates Microservices-Based Application Development
Microsoft recently announced the release of Microsoft Azure Service Fabric, a platform that supports the development of applications created using an assemblage of independent microservices as exemplified by the concept of Docker containers, for example. While Azure will be supporting Docker in a subsequent release of Windows Server, its support for microservices by means of the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric allows developers to enjoy the benefits of an architecture that uses Microsoft Azure’s indigenous microservices technology to create discrete application components that collectively enable enhanced scalability and the design of low latency, computationally intensive applications. Not surprisingly, Microsoft Azure Service Fabric features the ability to orchestrate and automate microservices in conjunction with application lifecycle management functionality for the distributed systems that are typically characteristic of applications composed of microservices. The platform also supports Visual Studio tools such as designers, editors and debuggers that facilitate the development, deployment and ongoing management of applications across a variety of operating systems, environments and devices. In the same way that Amazon Web Services recently rendered available the same machine learning and data science platform used by its own data scientists in the form of Amazon Machine Learning, the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric delivers the same core technology that Microsoft Azure has thus far used for Skype for Business, DocumentDB and Bing Cortana.
The platform’s deep experience with enterprise-grade applications that serve millions of users and files means that it “intrinsically understands the available infrastructure resources and needs of applications, enabling automatically updating, self-healing behavior that is essential to delivering highly available and durable services at hyper-scale.” As a result of its ability to understand the interplay between infrastructure, applications and distributed systems, the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric delivers a platform for development based on microservices designed to accommodate the needs of hyperscale applications. As such, Microsoft Azure Service Fabric constitutes a pre-packaged response and counterweight to the increasing traction of Docker technology by presenting Azure customers with a production-grade platform that supports stateless and stateful microservices while additionally featuring micro-services orchestration and automation, even though Microsoft plans to support Docker containers on its Azure platform in the future. In a nutshell, the Microsoft Azure Service Fabric gives developers much of the functionality of Docker and an attendant Docker management platform with the added feather in its cap that the platform has been used for years in production-grade environments for household name products such as Skype and Bing, while concurrently paving the way for streamlined usage of Docker containers on the Azure platform as well.
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