For enterprises that are getting into cloud computing for the first time, or jumping in deeper after getting some cloud experience, the Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud can be a great fit to bring it all together. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Microsoft Ignite
New Podcast – MVPITPro by Andy Syewicze & Rob Corradini
This is the start of an awesome podcast series called MVPITPro. I am excited to be working with MVP Andy Syewicze from Altaro Software to produce this series of podcasts for all the IT Pros out there. Episode one is with my fellow MVP and friend Symon Perriman of FanWide, and 5nine Software before that. 🙂 So sit back and enjoy the ride!!! And maybe you learn a little bit about being an MVP!!
Enjoy, until next time, Rob Corradini, MVP, Cloud & Datacenter
Azure Security Center: A Complete Guide
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To realize the full benefit of any cloud computing platform—Azure, AWS, or any other—you need to implement best practices related to security and compliance. All too often, data center security takes a backseat to data center design, which puts businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to keeping up with data regulations and preventing data breaches. A 2017 report from Intel Security notes that only 23% of organizations completely trust public clouds to keep their data secure. But with the right resources, it is possible for your organization to achieve both compliance and security in the cloud—without high costs, special expertise, or performance setbacks. Continue reading
Microsoft Ignite 2017 Summary and Announcements
Ignite 2017 Key takeaways
This was the first year I have not attended Microsoft Ignite, due to unforeseen circumstances. But this didn’t stop me from covering Ignite 2017. So here we go…
Ignite 2017 this year has about 25k attendees. During the same time as Ignite, they are also running Microsoft Envision. This is more focused to business leaders across industries. Its main focus is to have Business Leaders understand and manage their organizations in the Digital Age.
Ignite 2017 Attendee Breakout
- 47 % ITI/IT Pros
- 34% Developers
- 19% ITDM.
Top Industries Attended
- 34% IT and Software (flat YoY)
- 20% Education
- 9% Healthcare
- 9% Manufacturing
- 9% Professional & Business Services
Ignite Keynotes Summary and Links
- Satya Nadella – CEO
- Kirk Koenigsbauer (Modern Workplace)
- Jame Phillips (Business Applications)
- Scott Guthrie (The Enterprise Cloud)
Modern Workplace
Key Takeaways – Modern Workplace
Expanding Microsoft 365
- Microsoft 365 Firstline offering and Microsoft 365 Education
- New Windows 10 S devices from HP, Lenovo, Acer and Fujitsu starting at $275 USD
Intelligent personalized search power by Microsoft Graph
- Bing for business
- LinkedIn data integrated with Office 365 profile card
- Office 365 search & discovery improvements
- Windows 10 taskbar search
Intelligent Communications vision
- Bring voice and video + new cognitive and data services into Micro Teams
Advances in Intelligent Security
- Integrated Adminced threat Protection using Intelligent Security Graph
- Better data protection and access control across Microsoft 365
- New Compliance Manager, a single GDPR dashboard
Modernizing Business Process with Cloud and AI
Key Takeaways – Business Applications
New Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Solutions
- First solutions for customer care includes a virtual agent for customers, an intelligent assistant for support staff and conversational AI management tools, power by Microsoft AI
- HP, Macy’s, and Microsoft already using this technology to improve customer satisfaction and handle more requests, more quickly
Modular apps for Dynamics 365
- New modular apps are lightweight SaS services designed to transform one business process at a time
- Work with Dynamics 3 business apps or can be used independently
- Extend existing systems of record, integrate with Office 365 and augment with LinkedIn insights.
- First to allow talent leaders and hiring managers to address a company’s most important asset, people
- Attract: focused on recruiting | Onboard: helps you make new employees successful – Available later this year.
Deeper integration for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow + Office 365 and Dynamics 365
- Rapidly build apps, automate tasks, simplify workflows and solve unique business problems.
- Allow any business user familiar with InfoPath forms, Access databases or SharePoint list. This allows customers to build apps that help them achieve more, on a single no-code/low code platform.
Apps and Infra/Data and AI
- Every customer is an AI customer
The Enterprise Cloud
Key Takeaways – Hybrid
Delivering true hybrid consistency
- Azure Stack shipping through OEM partners including Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo
- Database Migration Service (DMS)
Empowering customer to optimize costs
- Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL server
- Azure Cost Management by CFloudyn – free to all Azure subscriptions
Key Takeaways – Intelligence
Any data, any place
- SQL Server on Linux Windows and Docker availability with SQL Server 2017 GA’
One convenient workbench for data scientists and AI developers
- Azure Machine Learning Updates
Build intelligent apps at global scale
- Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions integration
Performance and Scale for mission-critical analytic apps
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse preview release of new “optimized for compute” performance tier
Cloud for Good – Key takeaways
To empower nonprofits, Microsoft Philanthropies will:
- Microsoft has announced they met their 2016 commitment to donate $1 billion in cloud computing resources to nonprofits
- Continue the cloud donations program, and triple the number of nonprofits Microsoft serves over the next three years
- Launch a new Tech for Social Impact group, and the first offers, announced this week include:
- Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits
- Nonprofit Surface discounts for the first time ever
To get more detailed information about these announcements, please see links below or check out the Ignite2017 Site.
Official Microsoft Blog
Office Blogs
EMS Blog
Dynamics Blog
Azure Blog
Hybrid Cloud Blog
Data Platform Blogs
Until next time, Rob.
Storage Spaces Direct Explained – Applications & Performance
Applications
Microsoft SQL Server product group announced that SQL Server, either virtual or bare metal, is fully supported on Storage Spaces Direct. The Exchange Team did not have a clear endorsement for Exchange on S2D and clearly still prefers that Exchange is deployed on physical servers with local JBODs using Exchange Database Availability Groups or that customers simply move to O365.
Storage Spaces Direct Explained – Management & Operations
Good day everyone. It been a few weeks, like busy with work and such. Anyways, this post will go into how Management & Operations are done in S2D. Now, my biggest pet peeve is complex GUI management and yet again, Microsoft doesn’t disappoint. It still a number of steps in different interfaces to bring up S2D, Check out Aidan Finns blog post on disaggregated management from last year. It still rings true to this day with the release of 2016. It shouldn’t be this complex IMO 🙁 That being said, let move to the details.
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Storage Spaces Direct Explained – Fault Tolerance and Multisite Replication
Fault Tolerance…What does it mean? Let me break it down simply. Pictured above is just a bad design, not fault tolerance. This is not really what fault tolerance means. Having two or more of something is one factor, but how it’s implanted is just as important. Fault Tolerance incorporates two very important principles, High availability and Redundancy.
Now if we had a few toilets side by side and kept only 1 open and the other 2 on standby. Also, if it could move the user automatically to another toilet during a failure, then it technically it would be fault tolerant. Anyways, let’s move on from toilets to the real world. 🙂
Storage Spaces Direct Explained – ReFS, Multi-Tier Volumes and Erasure Coding
Here’s where we dive in and get dirty…but I promise by the end of my series, you will smiling like my friend here. I am planning a surprise with special guest bloggers. Stayed Tuned. Now one to the show…..
The NEW ReFS File System, Multi-Tier Volumes and Erasure Coding
Like S2D, the ReFS file system actually isn’t new either, they have been working on it for several releases now also. In Windows Server 2016, it finally drops the tech preview label and is now ready for production. And there is a lot of benefits… like volume creation doesn’t have to zero out the volume for 10 minutes like NTFS. It’s just a metadata operation that is effectively instantaneous now, I’m just going to focus on the couple of benefits that ReFS has for S2D.
For those not familiar Erasure coding (EC) and to prepare you for the next part, EC is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations.
The original goal of EC was to enable data that becomes corrupted at some point in the storage process to be reconstructed by using information about the data that’s stored elsewhere. Erasure codes are great, because of their ability to reduce the time and overhead required to reconstruct data. The drawback of erasure coding is that it can be more CPU-intensive, and that can translate into increased latency.
Now all that being said, classic erasure codes were designed and optimized more for communication, not for storage. Naively applying classic erasure codes in storage is okay, but is missing enormous efficiencies. Microsoft has developed their own erasure codes optimized for storage called Local Reconstruction Codes (LRC). I will cover this brieifly further down in the post.
Now back on to S2D…For data protection, S2D uses either 3-way mirroring or distributed parity with EC. Mirroring gives you great write performance, but only 33% data efficiency. EC gives you good data efficiency, but random write performance isn’t great for hot data. ReFS supports the ability to combine different disk tiers using different parity schemes in the same vDisk. This allows S2D to do real-time data tiering by writing new data to the mirror tier and then automatically rotating cold data out to the parity tier and applying the erasure code on data rotation.
It is important to note that ReFS does not currently support Deduplication. There was a question on this in every session and MSFT says that this is all the ReFS is currently focused on. So we’ll expect to see it land in ReFSv3. For now, customers can get dedupe with S2D by using NTFS. 🙁
Note if you only have two types of storage then the highest performing is used for the cache while the other type will be divided between performance and capacity with the different resiliency option (mirror vs parity) providing the performance/capacity difference between the tiers. If you only have one type of storage then the cache is disabled and the disks divided between performance and capacity like the previously mentioned case.
For non-Storage Spaces Direct only two tiers, of storage are supported like Windows Server 2012 R2, i.e. SSD and HDD, there is no cache. If you had NVMe storage that could be the “hot” tier while the rest of storage (SSD, HDD) could be the “cold” tier (you name the tiers whatever you want) but you cannot use three tiers.
During Ignite 2016, Microsoft took many shots at VMware. Microsoft said that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do erasure coding. “When you do it the wrong way, performance sucks and you have to limit it to all-flash configurations.”
Microsoft research is using a new technique called “Local Reconstruction Codes”. It uses smaller groups within the vDisk that allows them to recover from failures much faster by not having to reconstruct data from across the entire pool. This combined with multi-tier volumes gives S2D good performance, even on hybrid systems. Sounds like a technology that I seen before. Hmmm..I wonder where……. 😉
Ok, that’s all for now. next up, Fault Tolerance and Multisite Replication with S2D….
Until Next time, Rob….