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Microsoft Expanding Azure Stack Availability to 92 Countries
Microsoft announced this week that it's planning to expand the availability of Azure Stack to 92 countries, along with other Azure news.
The expansion plans represent a doubling of the number that was announced at last year's Microsoft Ignite event. Back then, Microsoft had indicated it had launched Azure Stack in 46 countries.
Azure Stack is Microsoft's "extension of Azure" for organizations. It can be accessed as a service, deployed by organizations as a hardware appliance in their own datacenters, or used in so-called "hybrid" (cloud plus premises) deployments. Azure Stack appliances are currently built by Dell EMC, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Lenovo and Terra. Avanade offers Azure Stack as a managed service.
Microsoft also described a few milestones this week for Azure, its cloud-based platform for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, as noted by Corey Sanders, corporate vice president of Azure.
Disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines reached "general availability" status, meaning the capability is deemed ready for commercial use by organizations. "With the general availability of this new service, you can configure disaster recovery within minutes, not days or weeks, with a built-in disaster recovery as a service that is unique to Azure," Sanders explained.
Azure Backup for SQL virtual machines (VMs) in Azure is now available in preview. The Azure Backup service is currently used for backing up Azure virtual machines (VMs), but now Microsoft is previewing the ability to back up "a SQL instance running on a VM," Sanders explained. With this preview, it's possible to "perform SQL log backups with 15-minute intervals on SQL Servers and SQL Always On Availability Groups," he claimed.
Microsoft now has a Run Command capability. It permits IT pros to "run scripts on an Azure VM directly from the Azure Portal without having to connect to the machine," Sanders noted. It can be used to troubleshoot a VM that has lost its network connection, he added. Microsoft has a Run Command for running PowerShell scripts in Windows VMs and a Run Command for running Bash scripts on Linux VMs. In addition to using the Azure Portal, the Run Command capability can be accessed using REST APIs, the Azure Command Line Interface or PowerShell.
Lastly, Sanders noted that Microsoft now has M-Series VM sizes with the largest memory option of "up to 12TB on a single VM." It can be used to boost the performance of SAP HANA enterprise resource planning solutions on Azure, he explained. It's one of the many partner expansions with SAP that Microsoft announced earlier this week.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.