What's new in MS Azure
Microsoft has always been distinguished by the regularity and dynamics of updating its product lines. Cloud technologies, as a priority, naturally preserved these traditions. In addition, announcing the new functionality in the clouds, you can not be attached to time periods, planned builds, etc., which gives free rein to both the vendor and partner companies, for whom the Azure platform has become a driver of development. In the article, I will talk about the innovations of the platform itself, as well as partner companies that have been released since the beginning of the year, consider what they were talking about at the WPC (Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference), and what awaits us in the near future.
Today, the Azure platform is available almost worldwide - in 140 countries. It supports the 10 most common languages and 24 currencies. Azure services are now available in 26 regions around the world. In the near future, availability is planned in 8 additional regions. Expansion of geography is a priority for Azure, because it allows customers to achieve higher performance, as well as maintain customer requirements and preferences regardless of the location of the data. Now in Europe, Azure services are available in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.
One of the breakthroughs was the entry of the platform into the Chinese market. This happened thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet (the largest Internet provider in China). The Azure platform, acquired and operated by 21Vianet, provides users with reliable, convenient and cost-effective cloud computing technologies. Thus, Microsoft is the first global company to make cloud services publicly available in the Middle Kingdom.
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Microsoft also invested $ 15 billion in the global data center infrastructure for the Azure platform. This enables customers to use the worldwide data center network as a cost-effective way to ensure availability. 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 main region. In the case of geo-abundant 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 priority for Microsoft is the concern for the environment. Thus, in 2014, the corporation achieved a neutral level of carbon emissions, and the average energy consumption (PUE) indicator reached 1.125 compared to industry data centers, for which this ratio is 1.7.
This year, the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 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 technological solutions.
The main theme of the conference was the "technological transformation" of business and the use of innovations to improve the productivity and efficiency of enterprises. Thus, according to the IDC study, business partners who have more than 50% of their income on a cloud grows twice as fast, receive 1.5 times more gross profit and 1.8 times more often receive additional income than business partners, which cloud accounts for less than 50% of revenue. Microsoft also announced that the participants in the partner channel of the company receive almost 20% more profit (aka.ms/channelprofit) than partners from 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 will provide companies with a comprehensive solution by combining cloud-based 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 will be able to purchase cloud SaaS applications from Microsoft and company partners tailored to their individual business needs.
These and other Microsoft products are mainly aimed at such industries as IT and software development, distribution, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government agencies, etc. And the main Microsoft partners are system integrators, independent software developers, distributors, etc. .
Windows as a Service
Today, the Windows 10 operating system is installed on more than 350 million devices, and more than 96% of Microsoft corporate customers are actively using it. According to a Forrester study, customers notice an increase in productivity and cost savings, 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 corporate service provider partners. Such a 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 quality service of licensed programs and services. He can provide an experienced and reliable partner.
loud Solution Provider is one of the most powerful areas of Microsoft. Over the past year, about 17,000 partners worldwide have come across the competence of a cloud solution provider. Now they can deliver Windows 10 as a SaaS subscription service in conjunction with the Office 365 business tools, Microsoft Azure cloud and CRM.
LinkedIn Deal
Buying Microsoft LinkedIn for $ 26.2 billion has many implications for partners. This question was not particularly discussed from the main stage, but it certainly spawned many conversations in the corridors and around the dining tables.
In general, Microsoft partners enthusiastically embraced the news of the third largest merger of companies 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 as a whole. For example, looking through a contact in one of these programs, the user will be able to see everything that this contact indicated on his LinkedIn profile, and not just the nickname and other nuggets of data, as is often the case now. In addition, deeper integration is likely. For example, when a LinkedIn profile becomes a user's main account in Office, Skype, or Windows.
For partners, all this will mean new opportunities and new tools that they can offer to their customers. And despite the fact that LinkedIn also has its own problems (this is a slowdown in the number of unique visitors, a decrease in advertising, a decrease in stock prices, etc.), they are confident that integration will benefit all - companies and partners, and end users.
New Azure stack
The basic capabilities for running Azure in local data centers appeared a few years ago. The new Azure stack has much more opportunities 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 aimed primarily at large companies, which usually buy dozens of servers simultaneously. For such companies, Azure Stack will replace the need to build the infrastructure on their own by providing a turnkey solution.
Typically, customers have several basic service requirements. For a start, they do not want to deal with complexity in 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 Azure services and tools available as soon as they appear and stay abreast of all the latest innovations. They are willing to sacrifice some of the infrastructure-level customization capabilities 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 a 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 maintenance in one solution. Microsoft and partners will be able to provide high quality services throughout the entire cycle of their delivery (during a sweep, adding new services and tools, upgrades, etc.) thanks to a specially designed management system for the entire stack.
Microsoft is committed to ensuring that partners and customers have a flexible choice of hardware. To do this, the corporation cooperates with such manufacturers as Dell, HPE, Lenovo - with their participation, integrated systems for production environments are created. From the middle of 2017, Microsoft is going to release integrated systems with the 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 environment, namely:
- Use Azure services to develop your own applications immediately;
- To gain experience in a unified environment, which was presented in Azure Stack TP1, and will be presented in future versions. This will allow much faster to master the new versions of the system (the next one will be presented at the same this year) and save time on training;
- Save your investment in the Microsoft Cloud Platform Solution (CPS). The fact is that now for the deployment of a private cloud based on Azure, you must purchase the Cloud Platform Solution system. Customers will now be able to use Azure Stack to manage CPS resources.
Read more about the Azure Stack on the Microsoft portal .
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.
Replication of virtual and physical machines in Azure
Azure now has the ability to replicate local VMware virtual machines or physical Windows or Linux servers to Azure using the Azure Site Recovery service. The user is available with 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 in the Azure portal, you can:
Site Recovery on the Azure portal provides many new features:
- The Azure Backup service and the Azure Site Recovery services are combined into one recovery services repository. In this way, you can customize business continuity and disaster recovery and manage these functions from one place. In a single dashboard, you can monitor and manage operations between your local sites and the Azure public cloud.
- Now users with Azure subscriptions, who are prepared to work within the program for cloud solution providers, have the opportunity to manage Site Recovery operations on the Azure portal.
- Using the Site Recovery service in the Azure portal, you can replicate computers to ARM storage accounts. During failover, Site Recovery creates ARM-based virtual machines in Azure.
- Site Recovery still supports replication to classic storage accounts. During a failover, Site Recovery creates virtual machines using the classic model.
For businesses, 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 service 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 transfer from Azure to VMware virtual machine servers on the local site.
- You can enable multiple virtual machine deployments and create replication groups so that application workloads distributed across multiple computers replicate simultaneously. All computers in a replication group have failover and consistent recovery points after a failover. For failover, you can combine multiple computers into recovery plans so that failover is performed for the entire distributed workload.
Read more about replicating virtual machines and servers on the Microsoft portal .
Integrating Azure Resource Manager into Citrix Cloud
A few months ago, the Citrix Cloud solution using the capabilities of Azure VPN was available only in the classic Azure mode. Now there is Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which is the native means of resource allocation of this platform. Thus, Citrix Cloud XenApp became the first tool integrated with ARM, the use of which greatly facilitates the hybrid deployment of resources in the Citrix cloud. You can literally do it in just a few steps, with a detailed description of the process you can find here .
Check Point vSEC for Azure
Check Point Software Technologies has unveiled its popular Vsec security system for Microsoft Azure. It is designed 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 of users, including those who use mobile devices in their work. Also, there is reliable protection against malicious software and the so-called zero-day threats - the most recent viruses and trojans that have not yet entered the anti-virus database. In addition, the company provides personal protective equipment tailored to the needs of a particular business. These tools include firewall, antivirus, antispam, antibot, data loss prevention and VPN services. To manage these funds, a centralized proprietary solution is provided that is suitable for both work in the cloud and for use on its own infrastructure.
You can deploy vSEC protection very quickly. This procedure is literally pressing one button and does not require any specific knowledge or the involvement of third-party specialists. The system can be purchased using two models: permanently (for a specified period) and temporary use. In the second case, the customer directly pays for the time that the system is active on its equipment. Tariffing in this case is hourly.
NetApp Private Storage for Azure
NetApp Colania 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 indicators of specialized enterprise-class storage systems. When 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 data protection at the physical level, as well as against various cyber threats.
Another advantage of this system is high performance. It is reached at the expense of the Azure ExpressRoute technology. Its use to connect NetApp storage to an Azure environment increases throughput by 36% compared to VPN and the Internet.
With NetApp Private Storage, users can work with multi-cloud environments and move data between cloud service provider environments. The Microsoft System Center solution and the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit software provide the ability to manage and transfer data between a private cloud and your private storage connected to Azure.
To track the new platform, which will see the light in the near future, MS has created a special resource . From the main and expected new products, we want to note the following:
- The emergence of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 . Already the first technical previews of this product have received many positive reviews thanks to a number of innovative features and tools. This, for example, is a new installation option for a server called Nano Server - a Windows Server version for working without a monitor. Or support for Docker, a mechanism for building and managing containers, which was originally developed for Linux. The platform also provides server virtualization, work with storage and networks based on software, server automation and management, work with web platforms and application platforms, access and information protection, as well as work with virtual desktops infrastructure and much more.
In the fifth Technical Preview, there were generally general improvements. Thus, the system began to work more accurately over time in physical and virtual machines, improved support for containers on Windows 10, simplified network management, updated the Nano Server imaging module, improved the recovery console (including the separation of incoming and outgoing firewall rules, and ability to restore WinRM configuration). In working with virtual machines appeared Encryption Supported mode (support for encryption). It offers more protection than in normal operation with a virtual machine, but less than in Shielded protected mode, etc.
- System Center 2016 . Microsoft System Center is a product that is designed to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of a virtualized software-defined data center infrastructure and hybrid clouds running on Windows Server 2016. System Center 2016 is also designed to more widely support heterogeneous environments, including stack monitoring. LAMP and massive improvements in UNIX / Linux monitoring. And finally, System Center 2016 will provide integrated integration with Microsoft Management Operations Suite (OMS) - a set of cloud services that complement and extend the functionality of System Center.
For all of this, System Center 2016 has many useful tools. For example, Virtual Machine Manager allows you to allocate clusters for data storage and computing on physical servers, monitor incoming and outgoing traffic of virtual machines using port access control lists, create secure virtual machines using Windows Azure Pack (WAP). System Center Operations Manager 2016 allows you to increase the coverage of infrastructure monitoring and applications in private and public clouds, as well as provide better support for Linux environments and integration with Operations Management Suite, which provides more extensive 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 status 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 Azure Public DNS . This tool allows you to place your DNS domain in Azure, so that users can now manage DNS records using the same credentials as billing for Azure. The global network of name servers uses Anycast routing to ensure high performance and availability.
Read more about Azure Public DNS on the Microsoft portal .
Azure now
Today, the Azure platform is available almost worldwide - in 140 countries. It supports the 10 most common languages and 24 currencies. Azure services are now available in 26 regions around the world. In the near future, availability is planned in 8 additional regions. Expansion of geography is a priority for Azure, because it allows customers to achieve higher performance, as well as maintain customer requirements and preferences regardless of the location of the data. Now in Europe, Azure services are available in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.
One of the breakthroughs was the entry of the platform into the Chinese market. This happened thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and 21Vianet (the largest Internet provider in China). The Azure platform, acquired and operated by 21Vianet, provides users with reliable, convenient and cost-effective cloud computing technologies. Thus, Microsoft is the first global company to make cloud services publicly available in the Middle Kingdom.
')
Microsoft also invested $ 15 billion in the global data center infrastructure for the Azure platform. This enables customers to use the worldwide data center network as a cost-effective way to ensure availability. 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 main region. In the case of geo-abundant 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 priority for Microsoft is the concern for the environment. Thus, in 2014, the corporation achieved a neutral level of carbon emissions, and the average energy consumption (PUE) indicator reached 1.125 compared to industry data centers, for which this ratio is 1.7.
What's New: WPC update
This year, the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 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 technological solutions.
The main theme of the conference was the "technological transformation" of business and the use of innovations to improve the productivity and efficiency of enterprises. Thus, according to the IDC study, business partners who have more than 50% of their income on a cloud grows twice as fast, receive 1.5 times more gross profit and 1.8 times more often receive additional income than business partners, which cloud accounts for less than 50% of revenue. Microsoft also announced that the participants in the partner channel of the company receive almost 20% more profit (aka.ms/channelprofit) than partners from 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 will provide companies with a comprehensive solution by combining cloud-based 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 will be able to purchase cloud SaaS applications from Microsoft and company partners tailored to their individual business needs.
These and other Microsoft products are mainly aimed at such industries as IT and software development, distribution, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government agencies, etc. And the main Microsoft partners are system integrators, independent software developers, distributors, etc. .
Windows as a Service
Today, the Windows 10 operating system is installed on more than 350 million devices, and more than 96% of Microsoft corporate customers are actively using it. According to a Forrester study, customers notice an increase in productivity and cost savings, 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 corporate service provider partners. Such a 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 quality service of licensed programs and services. He can provide an experienced and reliable partner.
loud Solution Provider is one of the most powerful areas of Microsoft. Over the past year, about 17,000 partners worldwide have come across the competence of a cloud solution provider. Now they can deliver Windows 10 as a SaaS subscription service in conjunction with the Office 365 business tools, Microsoft Azure cloud and CRM.
LinkedIn Deal
Buying Microsoft LinkedIn for $ 26.2 billion has many implications for partners. This question was not particularly discussed from the main stage, but it certainly spawned many conversations in the corridors and around the dining tables.
In general, Microsoft partners enthusiastically embraced the news of the third largest merger of companies 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 as a whole. For example, looking through a contact in one of these programs, the user will be able to see everything that this contact indicated on his LinkedIn profile, and not just the nickname and other nuggets of data, as is often the case now. In addition, deeper integration is likely. For example, when a LinkedIn profile becomes a user's main account in Office, Skype, or Windows.
For partners, all this will mean new opportunities and new tools that they can offer to their customers. And despite the fact that LinkedIn also has its own problems (this is a slowdown in the number of unique visitors, a decrease in advertising, a decrease in stock prices, etc.), they are confident that integration will benefit all - companies and partners, and end users.
New Azure stack
The basic capabilities for running Azure in local data centers appeared a few years ago. The new Azure stack has much more opportunities 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 aimed primarily at large companies, which usually buy dozens of servers simultaneously. For such companies, Azure Stack will replace the need to build the infrastructure on their own by providing a turnkey solution.
Typically, customers have several basic service requirements. For a start, they do not want to deal with complexity in 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 Azure services and tools available as soon as they appear and stay abreast of all the latest innovations. They are willing to sacrifice some of the infrastructure-level customization capabilities 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 a 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 maintenance in one solution. Microsoft and partners will be able to provide high quality services throughout the entire cycle of their delivery (during a sweep, adding new services and tools, upgrades, etc.) thanks to a specially designed management system for the entire stack.
Microsoft is committed to ensuring that partners and customers have a flexible choice of hardware. To do this, the corporation cooperates with such manufacturers as Dell, HPE, Lenovo - with their participation, integrated systems for production environments are created. From the middle of 2017, Microsoft is going to release integrated systems with the 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 environment, namely:
- Use Azure services to develop your own applications immediately;
- To gain experience in a unified environment, which was presented in Azure Stack TP1, and will be presented in future versions. This will allow much faster to master the new versions of the system (the next one will be presented at the same this year) and save time on training;
- Save your investment in the Microsoft Cloud Platform Solution (CPS). The fact is that now for the deployment of a private cloud based on Azure, you must purchase the Cloud Platform Solution system. Customers will now be able to use Azure Stack to manage CPS resources.
Read more about the 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.
Replication of virtual and physical machines in Azure
Azure now has the ability to replicate local VMware virtual machines or physical Windows or Linux servers to Azure using the Azure Site Recovery service. The user is available with 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 in the Azure portal, you can:
Site Recovery on the Azure portal provides many new features:
- The Azure Backup service and the Azure Site Recovery services are combined into one recovery services repository. In this way, you can customize business continuity and disaster recovery and manage these functions from one place. In a single dashboard, you can monitor and manage operations between your local sites and the Azure public cloud.
- Now users with Azure subscriptions, who are prepared to work within the program for cloud solution providers, have the opportunity to manage Site Recovery operations on the Azure portal.
- Using the Site Recovery service in the Azure portal, you can replicate computers to ARM storage accounts. During failover, Site Recovery creates ARM-based virtual machines in Azure.
- Site Recovery still supports replication to classic storage accounts. During a failover, Site Recovery creates virtual machines using the classic model.
For businesses, 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 service 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 transfer from Azure to VMware virtual machine servers on the local site.
- You can enable multiple virtual machine deployments and create replication groups so that application workloads distributed across multiple computers replicate simultaneously. All computers in a replication group have failover and consistent recovery points after a failover. For failover, you can combine multiple computers into recovery plans so that failover is performed for the entire distributed workload.
Read more about replicating virtual machines and servers on the Microsoft portal .
Integrating Azure Resource Manager into Citrix Cloud
A few months ago, the Citrix Cloud solution using the capabilities of Azure VPN was available only in the classic Azure mode. Now there is Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which is the native means of resource allocation of this platform. Thus, Citrix Cloud XenApp became the first tool integrated with ARM, the use of which greatly facilitates the hybrid deployment of resources in the Citrix cloud. You can literally do it in just a few steps, with a detailed description of the process you can find here .
Check Point vSEC for Azure
Check Point Software Technologies has unveiled its popular Vsec security system for Microsoft Azure. It is designed 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 of users, including those who use mobile devices in their work. Also, there is reliable protection against malicious software and the so-called zero-day threats - the most recent viruses and trojans that have not yet entered the anti-virus database. In addition, the company provides personal protective equipment tailored to the needs of a particular business. These tools include firewall, antivirus, antispam, antibot, data loss prevention and VPN services. To manage these funds, a centralized proprietary solution is provided that is suitable for both work in the cloud and for use on its own infrastructure.
You can deploy vSEC protection very quickly. This procedure is literally pressing one button and does not require any specific knowledge or the involvement of third-party specialists. The system can be purchased using two models: permanently (for a specified period) and temporary use. In the second case, the customer directly pays for the time that the system is active on its equipment. Tariffing in this case is hourly.
NetApp Private Storage for Azure
NetApp Colania 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 indicators of specialized enterprise-class storage systems. When 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 data protection at the physical level, as well as against various cyber threats.
Another advantage of this system is high performance. It is reached at the expense of the Azure ExpressRoute technology. Its use to connect NetApp storage to an Azure environment increases throughput by 36% compared to VPN and the Internet.
With NetApp Private Storage, users can work with multi-cloud environments and move data between cloud service provider environments. The Microsoft System Center solution and the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit software provide the ability to manage and transfer data between a private cloud and your private storage connected to Azure.
Perspectives and Announcements
To track the new platform, which will see the light in the near future, MS has created a special resource . From the main and expected new products, we want to note the following:
- The emergence of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 . Already the first technical previews of this product have received many positive reviews thanks to a number of innovative features and tools. This, for example, is a new installation option for a server called Nano Server - a Windows Server version for working without a monitor. Or support for Docker, a mechanism for building and managing containers, which was originally developed for Linux. The platform also provides server virtualization, work with storage and networks based on software, server automation and management, work with web platforms and application platforms, access and information protection, as well as work with virtual desktops infrastructure and much more.
In the fifth Technical Preview, there were generally general improvements. Thus, the system began to work more accurately over time in physical and virtual machines, improved support for containers on Windows 10, simplified network management, updated the Nano Server imaging module, improved the recovery console (including the separation of incoming and outgoing firewall rules, and ability to restore WinRM configuration). In working with virtual machines appeared Encryption Supported mode (support for encryption). It offers more protection than in normal operation with a virtual machine, but less than in Shielded protected mode, etc.
- System Center 2016 . Microsoft System Center is a product that is designed to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of a virtualized software-defined data center infrastructure and hybrid clouds running on Windows Server 2016. System Center 2016 is also designed to more widely support heterogeneous environments, including stack monitoring. LAMP and massive improvements in UNIX / Linux monitoring. And finally, System Center 2016 will provide integrated integration with Microsoft Management Operations Suite (OMS) - a set of cloud services that complement and extend the functionality of System Center.
For all of this, System Center 2016 has many useful tools. For example, Virtual Machine Manager allows you to allocate clusters for data storage and computing on physical servers, monitor incoming and outgoing traffic of virtual machines using port access control lists, create secure virtual machines using Windows Azure Pack (WAP). System Center Operations Manager 2016 allows you to increase the coverage of infrastructure monitoring and applications in private and public clouds, as well as provide better support for Linux environments and integration with Operations Management Suite, which provides more extensive 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 status 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 Azure Public DNS . This tool allows you to place your DNS domain in Azure, so that users can now manage DNS records using the same credentials as billing for Azure. The global network of name servers uses Anycast routing to ensure high performance and availability.
Read more about Azure Public DNS on the Microsoft portal .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307876/
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