On the occasion of its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Azure Stack to allow companies to use Azure in their data centers. The company also presented an overview of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016.
Azure Stack will allow companies to run IaaS and PaaS services internally. With its IT management products, Microsoft encourages some more companies to move their operations to the cloud. The software suite combines Microsoft Azure Stack infrastructure services and Azure platform so that companies can use these services to their internal operations.
In addition, the Microsoft Operations Management Suite helps manage workloads between different cloud services like Azure, Amazon Web Services, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack. Azure Stack will allow to use in the enterprise data center, consistent with the public Azure cloud.
Azure Stack notably incorporates the concept of Software-defined Network (SDN) and Software-defined Storage (SDS) to automate better the operation of applications and resources within the internal server farms. It includes a console to control and monitor workloads.
Azure Stack can be used to manage Microsoft virtualized software instances such as SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange, using the Azure Resource Manager software. It offers a number of security technologies to isolate workloads from one another, but load management can always be done from a central console.
Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) enables centralized management of workloads between systems. The suite can also be used to manage virtual machines or Docker type of containers that can be easily moved between different cloud services, internal or public. OMS manages the log analysis and searchable on millions of log files to identify and solve some malfunctions.
Moreover, Microsoft Operations Management Suite can support updates for Microsoft software system and collect information on safety related events. The suite also has a function of disaster recovery and can move resources to another data center in case of emergency at the regional level.
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft also unveiled Azure Data Lake, which allows to have a high capacity storage solution, adapted to the world of big data analytics. To facilitate the work of developers, this solution is compatible with HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and will be running directly from Hadoop distributions and applications. Data Lake is expected to swallow all data without limits, before returning them to the big data analytical applications.
Microsoft has also improved its IT management portal being developed for Azure, which aims to calm the nerves of IT professionals who care about the passage of the on-premises applications to the cloud provider. The release improves how IT personnel records its Azure services and the way they interact with the tool.
As companies move more and larger systems to the cloud, advanced management features become more important for IT professionals to monitor and control, to some extent, applications, services, computer, and data stored. Gradually, service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are adding new features to make IT management capabilities they offer their customers more efficient and broader in scope.
Microsoft is taking advantage of a remarkable gap left by Google and Amazon, the company’s largest rivals in the cloud computing category as both neither have large-scale projects for data centers of large companies.