The American tech giant Microsoft is moving down the path of further simplification and helping draw the world of legacy applications, hardware and the cloud a little bit closer together. They bring more hyper-converged hybrid cloud options to Azure, the growing collection of cloud services for building, deploying and managing intelligent applications through a global network of data centres.
Recently published Pandemic-Based IT Priority Shifts report highlights the strategic importance, the high degree of usage and budgets spent on hybrid computing models. Hybrid cloud is considered more important than the older and more established public cloud computing methodologies in many instances.
The private clouds and hybrid models combine and connect private cloud workloads with public cloud workloads serve as a critical stepping stone for most organizations. Tech vendors are creating new hybrid cloud offerings recently to tap into the burgeoning demand.
Microsoft also unveiled several new hybrid cloud-focused additions to its Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft also announced many additional capabilities for Azure Stack HCI – the local and on-premises compatible version of Azure that runs on specialized Microsoft-certified hardware appliance devices from their hardware partners like Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo. Azure is a public cloud computing platform with solutions including Software as a Service (SaaS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), that can be used for services such as analytics, virtual computing, networking, storage and much more.
The hardware appliances are built using hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), that combines all the elements of a data centre, including computation, storage and networking into a single software-defined box. It virtualizes all these elements, hence simple and off the shelf servers can be organized and optimized in such a way to improve their performance, functionality, and reliability. Also, these software-based data centre’s potential can both scale up to large data centre environments, scale down for branch offices or other edge computing applications.
Azure Stack HCI is now a fully native Azure service in which you can now use the Azure Portal as a combined management tool for public cloud Azure computing resources along with any local Azure Stack HCI resources, such as virtual machines, virtualized storage and more to monitors and manage all your public, private and hybrid-cloud-based workloads.
