One of the key endeavors of the cloud-first approach of Azure Backup is to empower enterprises to recover from security attacks, corruptions, disasters, or data loss situations quickly, securely, and reliably. Restoring servers efficiently in the wake of evolving IT threats involves going beyond recovering data alone from backups. Our customers have expressed varying degrees of complexity in how their operating systems and applications are configured. Restoring this dynamic configuration captured in the form of the Windows Server System State, in addition to data, with minimum infrastructure, forms a critical component of disaster recovery.
Today we are extending the data backup capabilities of the Azure Backup agent to enable customers to perform comprehensive, secure, and reliable Windows Server recoveries. We are excited to preview the support for backing up Windows Server System State directly to Azure with Azure Backup.
Azure Backup will now integrate with the Windows Server Backup feature that is available natively on every Windows Server and provide seamless and secure backups of your Windows Server System State directly to Azure without the need to provision any on-premises infrastructure.
Value proposition
Comprehensive Protection for Active Directory, File-Servers and IIS Web servers: Active Directory (AD) is the most critical database of any organization and therefore requires a backup strategy that allows for reliable recoveries during critical scenarios. System State of a domain-controller server captures the Active Directory and files that are required for domain-controller synchronization and allow for targeted Active Directory protection and restores.
On a File Server, System State captures important file-cluster configurations and policies that protect files from unauthorized access. Combined with file-folder backup, the backup of System State with Azure Backup agent provides the ability to comprehensively recover File Servers.
On an IIS Web Server, System state captures the IIS Metabase that contains crucial configuration information about the server, the site and even files and folders and therefore is the recommended option to restore Web Servers.
Cost-Effective Offsite for Disaster Recovery: System State for most Windows Servers is less than 50 GBs in size. For that size, at $5 a month and pay-as-you-go Azure storage, Azure Backup eliminates all infrastructure and licensing costs, and enables you to protect your Windows Server System State for reliable restores. No need to provision local hard-drives, or offsite storage, or employ additional tools or servers to manage system state backups and ensure their off-siting. Azure Backup takes care of off-siting System State on a specified schedule to Azure!
Secure Backups: The enhanced security features built into Azure Backup and data-resilience offered by Azure ensure that your critical system state backups remain secure from malicious attacks, corruptions, and deletions.
Flexible Restores: With Azure Backup’s Restore-as-a-Service, you can restore System State files from Azure without any egress charges. Additionally, you can apply System State to your Windows Servers at your convenience using the native Windows Server Backup utility.
Single management pane in Azure: All information related to System State backup jobs across all your Windows servers will be available in the Azure portal. You can also configure notifications directly from Azure to be notified in the event of a failed backup, so you can take corrective steps and ensure your servers are always prepared for disaster recovery!
Availability for Windows Server (Preview)
The support for backing up System State with Azure Backup agent is available in preview for all Windows Server versions from Windows Server 2016 all the way down to Windows Server 2008 R2!
Getting started
Follow the four simple steps below to start protecting your Windows Servers using Azure Backup!
Create an Azure Recovery Services Vault.
Download the latest version of the Azure Backup Agent from the Azure Portal.
Install and Register the Agent.
Start protecting Windows Server System State and other Files and Folders directly to Azure!
Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
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Invite Users to access Dynamics 365 with the Azure Active Directory business-to-business (B2B)
You can invite other users to access your Dynamics 365 CRM (online) instance. Your Office 365 Global admin can do this through the Azure portal. Invited users can access your Dynamics 365 CRM (online) instance using their own login credentials once a Dynamics 365 license and a security role are assigned to them. You don’t need to create a new user ID and temporary password for these invited users in your own Office 365 tenant.
Invite a user
Users can be added into Dynamics 365 through the Azure Active Directory B2B user collaboration. Global Admins and limited admins can use the Azure portal to invite B2B collaboration users to the directory, to any security group or to any application. Admins can use one of the following methods to invite B2B users to their Dynamics 365 instance:
Invite users to your Dynamics 365 instance that has a security group.
Professional graphics users in every industry count on an immersive, photorealistic, responsive environment to imagine, design, and build everything from airplanes to animated films. Traditionally, these high-powered workstations were tethered to physical facilities and shared among professional users such as designers, architects, engineers, and researchers. But today’s enterprises find themselves operating in multiple geographies, with distributed teams needing to collaborate in real-time.
Hence, last year we released Azure’s first GPU offerings targeting high-end graphics applications. NV based instances are powered by the NVIDIA GRID virtualization platform and NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs that provide 2048 CUDA cores per GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU as well. These instances provide over 2x performance increase in graphics-accelerated applications as compared to the previous generations.
Targeting the high-end workstation user, you can run NVIDIA Quadro GPU optimized applications such as Dassault Systems CATIA or Siemens PLM per user directly on the NV instances without the need to deal with the complexity of licensing. Additionally, with up to 4 GPUs via NV24 you’re able to run up to 4 concurrent users utilizing these Quadro applications with features such as multiple displays, larger maximum resolutions and certified Quadro software features from hundreds of software vendors.
Furthermore, if your organization has a need to run Virtual Apps or Virtual Desktops using solutions like RDS, Citrix XenApp Essentials, VMware Horizon, or Workspot, you’re now able to run up to 25 concurrent RDSH users per GPU. Office workers and professionals who don’t require Quadro optimized applications, can finally enjoy virtual desktops with a high-quality user experience that's optimized for productivity applications. It's all the performance of a physical PC, where and when you need it. You can now dramatically lower IT operational expense and focus on managing the users instead of PCs.
NV6
NV12
NV24
Cores
6
12
24
GPU
1 x M60 GPU
2 x M60 GPUs
4 x M60 GPUs
Memory
56 GB
112 GB
224 GB
Disk
380 GB SSD
680 GB SSD
1.44 TB SSD
Network
Azure Network
Azure Network
Azure Network
Virtual Workstations
1
2
4
RDSH Virtual Apps and Virtual Desktops
25
50
100
“Because so many of today’s modern applications and operating systems require GPU acceleration, organizations are seeking greater flexibility in their deployment and cost options,” says John Fanelli, VP NVIDIA GRID. “With NVIDIA GRID software and NVIDIA Tesla M60s running on Azure, Microsoft is delivering the benefits of cloud-based RDSH virtual apps and desktops to enable broad-scale, graphics-accelerated virtualization in the cloud that meets the needs of any enterprise.”
These new updates will go a long way to making sure that you have the best infrastructure whether you’re running the most graphics demanding CAD application that require Quadro optimization or if you’re just running office productivity applications on the go.
My excellent cloud adventure: first steps, first mistakes
Early in my career, I gave up photojournalism for computing. I worked in a small town, and across the square from my newspaper office was a computer center. They had a mainframe computer and five customers – banks, all of them. The guy who ran it was ancient: a grizzled, chain-smoking veteran who’d worked in computing since its dawn 30 years earlier. He offered me a 50 percent raise and all the free sodas I could drink if I learned how to run the bank processing every night.
I did.
This was 1985, and it was for me the beginning of an itinerant journey from one bleeding edge of the business to another. Fast forward approximately 30 years, and I am at Microsoft, stepping once again onto new terrain. As a Principal Software Engineering manager in Microsoft IT, I’ve spent the past three years immersed in the most interesting and unexpected ride of my career: helping Microsoft move our entire IT footprint to the cloud.
We’re making solid progress. Along the way, we’ve unearthed a lot of hard-earned wisdom. Our lessons are frequently the results of unforeseen problems, gnarly issues, and flat-out mistakes. Not surprisingly, our customers are quite curious to hear about this stuff in order to avoid experiencing the same pains themselves.
For today, let me share one of the first great lessons we learned.
As we built the strategy to move as fast as we could, one of the first and seemingly obvious things to do was to “lift and shift” our virtual machines (VMs) into the cloud. At that point, we had about 60,000 VMs running in on-premises servers across the company. It seemed rather logical that we could just “lift” them off our resident hardware and “shift” them onto the Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud platform. Pick ‘em up, move ‘em on, shut down the hardware, and it’s all good, right?
Wrong.
It wasn’t long before we discovered that “lift and shift” in and of itself doesn’t work out too well. First off, it can increase your costs if you don’t know what you’re doing. VMs aren’t simple and nor do they operate independent of other factors. All that complexity can lead to a lot of unforeseen expenses. Your apps use data – a lot of which might remain on premises for some time in-house – and that can require expensive ExpressRoute connections to ensure security and compliance. Subscription costs, management challenges, and the many moving parts associated with a move to the cloud all represent potential problems that not only threaten to add costs but also to send you in unwanted directions.
After a couple years of wrestling with these problems, we finally came up with the right strategy.
Todd Himple, one of the senior engineering leaders on the team, and I managed to get it all onto one single slide, with the simple headline of “Microsoft IT’s Cloud Strategy.” We literally drew it on a whiteboard one day. And it’s probably one of the most viral slides in the company over the past couple years. It’s basically an inverted funnel:
You proceed from the top down, starting with “Retire it, right-size, eliminate environments.” In other words, just kill off as much as you can. Typically, this is more than 25 percent of everything in your datacenter – just garbage. Toss it out.
Going down the funnel, you move through the processes of using Software as a Service (SaaS), converting to Platform as a Service (PaaS), optimizing IaaS, and at the bottom, remaining on-premises. Literally, the last step in the roadmap is “lift and shift” – ironically, one of the first things we did when we started our cloud journey. There’s a place for it, but it should be done in the context of a comprehensive approach.
If this piques your interest or you’d like to know more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your local Microsoft representative to arrange a visit to our Executive Briefing Center. And of course, we’re happy to share a whole universe of knowledge with you on IT Showcase.
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
Thread manufacturer spins its future in the cloud
Coats, the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer, has made the Microsoft cloud the linchpin of its strategy to transform its business for a data-driven age. Coats is moving all its datacenter assets into Microsoft Azure, including its production SAP HANA systems, to gain elasticity, vastly improve performance, and lower costs. Its 7,000 employees with access to Microsoft Office 365 use it to share and make sense of information across different locations and time zones. The technology team supports anywhere, any device productivity by securing applications and data with the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security suite. By adopting Azure and Office 365, Coats can now explore new Microsoft cloud services such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform its products, optimize operations, empower employees, and interact with customers.
On the surface, Coats could be mistaken for a traditional manufacturing company. It was founded during the Industrial Revolution and still has factories filled with large-scale thread-making, dyeing, and winding machinery. But you don’t survive for more than 260 years without keeping up with the times. And Coats has proved adept at looking beyond spinning spindles and seeing that its business is about far more than making thread. It’s about using information to solve customer problems.
How to stay relevant for more than 260 years
Coats makes thread. Lots of thread. Every week, 1 billion tea bags are brewed using Coats thread. Every month, Coats produces enough thread to stretch all the way to the sun. Each year, Coats makes enough thread to go into 8 billion pairs of jeans—a pair for every person on the planet. Making that much thread, from a diverse range of materials in every conceivable color, is a huge manufacturing challenge.
Coats can trace its origins back to the 1750s and is proud of its rich heritage, including, for example, the fact that in 1879, Thomas Edison used Coats thread in his experiments to invent the light bulb. The company has grown over the centuries and is today the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer. It also provides complementary, value-added products and services to the apparel and footwear industries. In addition, it applies innovative techniques to develop high-tech performance-materials threads and yarns in areas such as automotive and fibre optics products.
When it comes to technology, Coats has traditionally focused on keeping its manufacturing equipment and processes up-to-date because, after all, manufacturing was its core business. About five years ago, however, with the rise of big data, a new reality began to set in: Coats was really in the information business. “We realized that our future lay in the smart use of data, to create more-intelligent manufacturing processes, to reduce manufacturing costs, and to provide more innovative ways to meet customer needs,” says Richard Cammish, Chief Information Officer at Coats. “We needed to transform our information intelligence to create customer solutions faster, cheaper, and better than ever.”
Adds Harold Groothedde, Technology Solutions Director at Coats, “We’ve always been very advanced in manufacturing technology but slower moving in IT operations. In 2013, we still used Lotus Notes for email and had a fragmented desktop environment. With 7,000 of our wired employees spread across multiple locations on six continents and some 60 manufacturing facilities, we sorely needed more empowering communications and collaboration technology. We wanted our employees to share ideas and improvements more frequently and very easily.”
The company’s information technology mantra became “invisible technology, visible performance,” meaning, technology that allows people to work more efficiently without getting in the way.
Coats had state-of-the-art factories around the world, but manufacturing was siloed geographically; products that were manufactured in one country were sold in that country. Coats wanted a more unified view and flexible use of its global manufacturing capacity. Although the company used SAP software to manage manufacturing across some 60 manufacturing sites, it could not easily produce reports across factories, which deprived management of a holistic view of the business. Plus, those SAP reports took hours to generate, which created delays of up to 48 hours in business decisions.
Additionally, the company’s datacenter infrastructure was not agile enough to serve the dynamics of modern markets. Coats needed to spin up customer demonstration environments in hours and to launch test environments so that software developers could play with a new application. But it took weeks to order and provision servers, and it was impossible to scale infrastructure selectively in various locations.
For example, the company was experiencing dynamic growth in China but couldn’t deliver enough web performance for web visitors in China to play online product demonstration videos. Expanding in China also meant offering secure e-commerce services, which was difficult to do.
Ally strategically with Microsoft
Coats made a strategic decision to embrace cloud computing so it could gain the infrastructure elasticity and resilience it needed to run a global business and minimize the time its staff spent on datacenter tasks. “Deploying servers and managing email are not our core competencies,” says Groothedde. “Let someone else take care of that.”
Coats evaluated all the major cloud providers—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—and felt that Microsoft was the best partner to complement its existing service portfolio and strategic technology direction. “The breadth and scale of the Microsoft cloud was impressive,” says Cammish. “It had Office 365 on the desktop productivity side and Azure on the datacenter side. We could use Azure Active Directory Premium to provide single sign-on for all applications, from email to SAP, which would support our ‘invisible technology’ objective.”
On the datacenter side, Coats has a mixed environment, with applications based on both Windows and the Linux operating system. “We wanted a datacenter provider that could support all our systems,” Groothedde says.
Microsoft committed comprehensive support in getting critical Coats applications such as SAP running in Azure. “The support we’ve received from Microsoft has been phenomenal,” says Cammish. “When you move your technology to a third-party datacenter, it is absolutely critical that you have attentive support in the event that something goes wrong. We got that from Microsoft. For me, as the person accountable for all the technology at Coats, this was very reassuring. Microsoft really cared about our success; this is a fundamental ingredient in any effective partnership and something which the technology industry needs more of.”
Cammish and Groothedde also felt that Azure security was superior to anything they could set up themselves. “From the Office 365 perspective, we knew that Microsoft was best qualified to secure its own products,” Groothedde says. “But on the Azure side, we would be running e-commerce transactions in the cloud, and we had to have ironclad security. We felt that Azure had all the security bases covered.”
Being able to crunch massive amounts of data across dozens of variables requires monstrous processing power, and Azure gives us high-performance virtual machines customized for HANA.
Harold Groothedde: Technology Solutions Director
Coats
Pool ideas, help one another
The company’s first step into the Microsoft cloud was its deployment of Microsoft Office 365 for all 7,000 wired employees. Coats gave these employees cloud-based email (Microsoft Exchange Online) and Internet-based telephony, instant messaging, and video conferencing through Skype for Business Online.
It migrated its 400-plus Lotus Notes applications into Microsoft SharePoint Online, which also became the foundation of the company’s intranet. Employees save files in the cloud, in Microsoft OneDrive for Business, rather than on personal hard drives, and can get to them from any location and device.
“With Office 365, employees can communicate with one another instantly, in any way that suits the need,” Groothedde says. “We’ve been able to connect a workforce fragmented across many sites and time zones in a seamless way. It’s fundamentally changed the way our office workers do business.”
Employees can see from the presence icon whether a colleague is available for contact, send that person an instant message, escalate the conversation to a voice call or video call, and share spreadsheets or manufacturing processes by sharing screens. Having a common, rich communications fabric encourages employees to reach out, ask questions, share ideas, and help one another. Employees in one factory can help colleagues in another factory to set up equipment correctly using “show and tell” video calls. By eliminating waits and miscommunications throughout the day, the whole business speeds up.
Plus, “All these capabilities are standard stuff for millennials, who expect capabilities such as chat and video conferencing at work,” Groothedde adds. “Office 365 has opened up more flexible work options such as home working, which is a hiring and retention advantage.”
Create a skinny infrastructure
The next step was to move nearly its entire datacenter footprint out of third-party datacenters into Microsoft Azure. The company is after what Cammish calls “skinny infrastructure”—with as few moving parts on-site as possible.
“We don’t want to be in the datacenter business; we’re in the thread business,” Cammish says. “We plan to move 90 percent of our global datacenter infrastructure into Azure, and we’re at about 75 percent now. The only things we’ll leave on-site are a few domain controllers and file/print servers.”
Coats gets tremendous economies of scale in Azure, which means significantly lower capital and operating costs and unprecedented levels of agility. Software developers, marketing teams, and customer support teams can spin up compute and storage resources as needed. “With Azure, we get storage and processing capacity on demand, something we didn’t have access to previously, and which now gives us much more operational flexibility and responsiveness,” Cammish says.
The company is moving into the services business, advising customers on their manufacturing processes and helping them predict how much thread they’ll need to manufacture particular garments. Crunching massive amounts of data becomes very complex very fast, and the ability to scale Azure resources lets Coats meet more customer needs. “Azure lets us pour on performance for short periods of time, while we’re giving demos or setting up temporary training and test environments, and then release those resources when we’re done,” Groothedde says. “It’s a very efficient way to operate.”
Great performance, on-demand capacity, and security are all important in supporting the company’s global e-commerce engine, which runs in Azure. Coats can tune e-commerce performance selectively in different Azure datacenters around the world, which has been critical in global expansion, especially in China. “We get consistent levels of infrastructure security with Azure, because we can leverage a wealth of security technologies that Microsoft is constantly improving,” says Groothedde. “We also have fewer endpoints to manage. We use Azure Security Center to monitor our environment, and with it we can be much more responsive when threats are identified.”
SAP HANA on Azure: Speeding up the whole business
For years, Coats used the Oracle database with its SAP applications. However, to improve SAP performance, it decided to switch to the SAP HANA database. Coats consulted with Microsoft about running SAP HANA on Azure, because HANA requires a very specialized server. The company was pleased to find out that Microsoft was just putting the finishing touches on a solution called, appropriately enough, SAP HANA on Azure.
SAP HANA on Azure relies on robust (G-Series) Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure Network and, in Coats’s case, Azure ExpressRoute for even higher-performance connectivity between Coats and global Azure datacenters.
Working with two prime consulting partners—Axians, which helped configure SAP HANA, and Brillio, which configured Coats’s SAP HANA on Azure estate—Coats moved its complex Oracle environment to HANA on Azure. “Moving SAP anywhere is difficult,” says Groothedde. “It’s complex software, and we have more than 180 servers in our environment. But the Microsoft SAP Center of Excellence provided exceptional support, both strategically and tactically, as we worked through various hurdles.”
Microsoft took care of problem escalation with SAP, and Coats had peace of mind in knowing that all of Microsoft’s architectural decisions were vetted by SAP.
With its move of SAP HANA to Azure, Coats racked up another distinction: it was the first organization in the world to run its production SAP HANA software in Azure. That includes four separate instances of the SAP ECC for North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, and a consolidated instance of the enterprise resource planning suite.
The performance boosts from running SAP on HANA in Azure have been remarkable. Transactions times have been reduced considerably in many cases. Reports that previously took 6 hours to produce now take 6 minutes. “By moving SAP HANA to Azure, we have been able to speed up planning cycles and accelerate delivery of finished goods to our customers,” Cammish says. “We are now in a position to do same-day factory production planning versus having to run scheduling jobs overnight. We have the ability to insert rush orders into the production schedule the same day versus waiting 24 to 48 hours. Our whole production engine can now speed up and improve customer service and delivery performance.”
The potential for using data in smarter ways to operate more efficiently, save money, and satisfy customers is immense. Azure gives us integrated tools that let us fully integrate and exploit our data.
Harold Groothedde: Technology Solutions Director
Coats
See the business in real time
The reporting speedup has been particularly impactful. Managers can push a button on a tablet computer and use Microsoft Power BI and SAP Business Objects to instantly see data from multiple sources as graphical dashboard-style reports. For example, at a glance they can see current sales order lead times and shipment status across all the company’s factories and deliver the service that customers expect.
Crunching data at Coats involves taking into account hundreds of thread materials, more than 150,000 colors, some 60 manufacturing sites, diverse customer requirements, and many other variables. “Being able to crunch massive amounts of data across dozens of variables requires monstrous processing power, and Azure gives us high-performance virtual machines customized for HANA,” Groothedde says.
Protect mobile data
To keep data safe as it travels from the Azure cloud to Office 365, SAP, and other applications on mobile devices, Coats uses the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite. The suite’s Azure Active Directory Premium service provides single sign-on for some of the company’s applications, to simplify and speed work throughout the day. And Microsoft Intune provides a cloud-based console that will ultimately be used to manage the company’s 7,000 desktop computers, 2,500 mobile devices, and the applications running on them.
“We wouldn’t feel good about displaying SAP data on mobile devices without Intune protecting our data,” Groothedde says. “Our users can access reports on Windows-based devices, iPads, iPhones, or any other device without complicated procedures for signing in to a virtual private network and with complete security. Intune opens up a whole new world in how we manage applications in diverse device environments.”
Coats has also created virtual desktops in Azure to give employees personalized desktops on tap from any device, which is especially useful in factory environments where PCs are shared by multiple employees. “Virtual desktops give us an easy, secure way to give factory floor workers, mobile employees, and contractors access to needed applications without deploying dedicated devices to each person,” says Groothedde.
Looking to the future
As it looks ahead, Coats is excited about the many new Microsoft cloud services it can use to transform its business. It’s experimenting with Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite to add predictive analytics. For example, based on past manufacturing histories, weather around the world, and other factors, Coats can predict inventory costs, demand for various types of thread, manufacturing volumes, and more.
“If we can better predict all these factors, we can better order the right inventory, manufacture the correct volumes, and deliver exactly what our customers want, even before they know they need it,” says Groothedde.
Coats is running a pilot project focused on operator and machine efficiency in the final winding thread production process. The company has applied sensors to the final winding equipment and made use of a control and feedback system to monitor and control this process. Coats pushes this data into the Azure IoT Hub for reporting with Power BI and then into the Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Hadoop for processing by Azure Machine Learning.
“The potential for using data in smarter ways to operate more efficiently, save money, and satisfy customers is immense,” Groothedde says. “Azure gives us integrated tools that let us fully integrate and exploit our data.”
Adds Cammish, “By using the Microsoft cloud, we’re transforming for a digital age, where information is king. We are excited about using data to power our business into its next 260 years.”
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Azure Monitor
Get the granular, up-to-date monitoring data you need—all in one place
View and manage all your monitoring data easily
Know every detail as it happens—all from one dashboard—with Azure Monitor. You get detailed, up-to-date performance and utilization data, access to the activity log that tracks every API call, and diagnostic logs that help you debug issues in your Azure resources. All the monitoring data you need to operate and maintain your Azure resources is centrally available through Azure Monitor.
Set up alerts and take automated actions
It’s better to detect an issue before it affects your business. With Azure Monitor, you can set up alerts and respond proactively to events by setting up automated actions such as autoscaling a resource, starting an Azure Automation runbook, or calling a webhook.
Diagnose operational issues quickly
When a problem occurs, you need to find the source fast. Azure Monitor gives you the basic tools you need to analyze and diagnose any operational issue, so you can resolve it efficiently. Create dashboards with graphs of performance metrics, search through subscription activity, and share your insights with others.
Integrate with your existing tools
Get rich end-to-end monitoring and analytics by combining Azure Monitor with the analysis tools familiar to you. Azure Monitor integrates with Application Insights, Operations Management Suite Insight & Analytics, and a variety of partner tools. It also offers REST APIs and webhooks that you can use to build custom integrations.
Containers have been at the forefront of cloud transformation in recent years, and for good reason: Container technologies let organizations more easily build, deploy and move applications to and from the cloud. With this increase in agility and portability, containers are helping to make applications the new currency in the cloud. At Microsoft, we’ve seen explosive growth in both interest and deployment of containerized workloads on Azure, and we’re committed to ensuring Azure is the best place to run them.
To support this vision, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Deis – a company that has been at the center of the container transformation. Deis gives developers the means to vastly improve application agility, efficiency and reliability through their Kubernetes container management technologies.
In addition to their container expertise, the Deis team brings a depth of open source technology experience – furthering Microsoft’s commitments to improve developer productivity and to provide choice and flexibility for our customers everywhere. Members of the Deis team are strong supporters of the open source community – developing tools, contributing code and organizing developer meetups. We expect Deis’ technology to make it even easier for customers to work with our existing container portfolio including Linux and Windows Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers and Azure Container Service, no matter what tools they choose to use.
We’re excited to bring the Deis team and their technology to Microsoft. I look forward to seeing the impact their contributions will have on Azure and the Microsoft developer experience.
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
The best public cloud for SAP workloads gets more powerful
More and more enterprise customers are realizing the benefits of moving their core business applications to the cloud. Many have moved beyond the conversation of “why cloud” to “which cloud provider.” Customers want the assurance of performance, privacy and scale for their mission critical applications. Microsoft Azure sets the bar for scale and performance, leads in compliance and trust measure, and offers the most global reach of any public cloud. Specifically for SAP workloads, our strong partnership with SAP enables us to provide our mutual customers best-in-class support for their most demanding enterprise applications.
We’ve invested deeply to ensure that Azure is the best public cloud for our customers’ SAP HANA workloads. Azure provides the most powerful and scalable infrastructure of any public cloud provider for HANA. Azure also offers customers the ability to extract more intelligence from their SAP solution environments with AI and analytics, and our broad, longstanding partnership with SAP includes integrations with Office 365 to help customer enhance productivity, too. Lastly, we have an enormous partner ecosystem ready to help enterprises succeed with SAP solution workloads.
I’m pleased to announce several new advancements to this key area of focus:
Support for running some of the largest public cloud estates of SAP HANA, across both virtual machines and Large Instance offerings.
To power SAP HANA and other high-end database workloads, we’re introducing M-Series virtual machines powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v3 that support single node configurations up to 3.5TB memory. This will allow customers to quickly spin up a new virtual machine to test a new business process scenario and turn it off when the testing is done to avoid incurring additional costs.
Real-time, transactional business applications need scale up power within a single node. For customers using OLTP landscapes like SAP S/4HANA or SoH that go beyond the limits of today’s hypervisors, we’re announcing a range of new SAP HANA on Azure Large Instance SKUs, powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4 from 4TB to 20TB memory.
SAP business warehousing environments that harness and capture intelligence from massive volumes of data require multi-node, scale-out systems. We’re introducing support for SAP HANA Large instances up to 60TB memory for potential future use for applications like SAP BW, and SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Cloud Platform: SAP’s platform-as-a-service offering is now available as a public preview hosted on Microsoft Azure. Customers can take advantage of the pre-built SAP Cloud Platform components to build business applications while leveraging the broader toolset of Azure services.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: In cooperation with SAP, we are working to make Azure available as a deployment option for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP’s secure managed cloud offering. Customers will benefit from Azure’s enterprise-proven compliance and security, in addition to close connections between their other Azure workloads and SAP solutions running on Azure in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
SAP and Azure Active Directory Single-Sign-On: SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication Services are now integrated with Azure Active Directory. This integration enables customers to implement friction-free, web-based, single-sign-on capabilities across all SAP solutions that integrate with SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication. In addition, SAP SaaS solutions (e.g. Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.), as well as core SAP NetWeaver-based solutions or SAP HANA, are integrated with Azure Active Directory.
Last year, Satya Nadella took the stage at SAPPHIRE, announcing a new era of partnership with SAP – and at the time we shared that early adopters, Coats LLC and Rockwell Automation, were using Azure Large Instance infrastructure to run their SAP solution environments. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with customers choosing to deploy SAP on Azure. Just a few examples of the companies deciding on Azure as their cloud platform for SAP solution landscapes are:
Accenture: This is the largest business warehousing SAP HANA deployment in the public cloud, running Accenture’s own mission-critical financial reporting systems on Azure. For more about Accenture’s use of Azure, don’t miss their session at SAPPHIRE NOW’17 this week.
Pact Group: By choosing to migrate their on-premises SAP servers to Azure, this Asia-Pacific packaging company anticipates annualized savings of 20 percent with their business now running more than 90% of its applications and compute on Azure.
Mosaic: One of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and potash crop nutrients moved all its global financial, commercial, and supply-chain SAP systems to Azure, increasing speed and agility. The company anticipates a year over year cost savings of 20 percent.
IXOM: When they needed to separate from their parent company, water treatment and chemical distributor IXOM chose to move its SAP applications to Microsoft Azure, taking a cloud-first approach to the future.
Subsea7: This world-leading seabed-to-surface engineering, construction and services contractor is working with Accenture to unlock cost savings and greater efficiencies through SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA hosted on Azure. Subsea 7 aims to deliver a simpler, faster and more tightly integrated landscape to its global employees, providing more mobility, agility and an enhanced user experience.
One of the key advantages of Azure is that customers can drive intelligence and insights from their SAP solution environments by integrating with solutions like Power BI and Cortana Intelligence, powering new business opportunities and efficiencies.
Our integration partners are a critical part of SAP solutions on Azure deployments as they help ensure customer success, leveraging their skill and expertise across both the Microsoft and SAP ecosystems. At SAPPHIRE NOW’17, Microsoft will host some of our top Global System Integrator partners including Accenture, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro to showcase the value and operational improvements each of these organizations can provide to customers looking to deploy SAP on Azure.
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