AWS to Azure migration included in Microsoft’s hybrid cloud updates.
In the run up to its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft rolled out some new and some tweaked cloud features which it hopes partners will proselytize.Building on some of the developments to Microsoft Azure that were revealed at the Ignite event in May, Microsoft is making some further updates to its hybrid cloud offering.
Moving from expensive on-premise infrastructure to cloud-based systems is supposed to offer enterprises a lot more flexibility, but there are tradeoffs.Microsoft launched a new service Thursday that replicates VMware private cloud and physical server workloads to its Azure cloud, for disaster recovery purposes. While Microsoft MSFT 0.20% corporate dealt with big layoffs and charges related to its phone business this week, the Azure cloud group was all business.
This update includes the launch of a couple of new features for developers who want to run large-scale, compute-intensive applications on the platform, as well as new features for Azure Site Recovery that will make it easier for developers to migrate to Azure from AWS. VMware customers can now replicate their virtual machines and workloads to Azure and recover them from the Microsoft cloud, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Enterprise Client and Mobility team, said in a blog post Thursday. After Microsoft acquired InMage almost exactly a year ago, the company quickly started to integrate InMage’s technology for migrating workloads between clouds into its own portfolio.
The scalable platform also enables hosting companies, system integrators and managed service providers to build value-added solutions for their customers. Virtzilla also offers a disaster recovery (DR) service in vCloud Air, because DR is such a blindingly obvious application of the cloud but also because the end-to-end vSphere story works well there too: if you’re going to fail over you might as well fail over into the same environment you already operate. On Friday, for example, the company said its revamped PowerBI service, which will allow people to query data sets using natural language requests, will be broadly available on July 24, Also available that day will be Power BI Desktop, formerly known as Power BI Designer (Microsoft, why must you confuse us this way?) which targets business analysts who need to pull data from many sources, clean it up and normalize it so it can be pooled and parsed. The first result of that was a preview release of the Azure Migration Accelerator, which makes it easier to move physical, VMware, AWS and Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure. This means that administrators can now manage corporate workloads across on-premise and public clouds, including Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, Hyper-V and VMware.
Companies can stop investing in expensive, hard-to-maintain data centers and move to the cloud where they only pay for the resources (compute power and storage) they need, and the vendor maintains the infrastructure. VMware offers disaster recovery on its vCloud Air public cloud, but Microsoft — as part of its companywide push to support other vendors’ technologies — is pitching the new Azure service as an alternative. On the high performance computing front, Microsoft has made some other updates to help users gain better control of how Azure manages their workloads. Oh, and to pre-empt data analytics pushes by cloud rivals Google GOOG 1.78% and Amazon AMZN 2.10% On Monday, Microsoft will provide a sneak peek of a new Azure data catalog. Konube Integration is currently available and customers are taking advantage of the solution to simplify how they manage VMs across cloud environments. “Simplicity and ease of use is the cornerstone of Konube software and one of our founding principles,” says Charles Prakash Dasari, President and CEO of Konube. “In line with these principles we designed Konube Integrator to enable users to provision, control, visualize and monitor the virtual machines through one seamless interface across cloud providers.
Here are the main announcements: General availability of Azure Batch: unveiled in preview at the end of October last year, Azure Batch is a resulting solution of the GreenButton acquisition, which allows customers to manage large-scale, high-performance computing scenarios in Azure. It’s now generally available, and it’s already being used by the likes of Towers Watson and TVEverywhere to manage complex scenarios in the cloud, from risk modelling to video encoding Release of HPC Pack 2012 R2 Update 2 to support Linux Virtual Machines in Azure: with this latest pack, customers can build and manage high-performance clusters either on-premises, hybrid, or completely in the cloud. That’s almost certainly a significant irritant to VMware, which talks of welcome momentum for vCloud Air but is yet to trumpet it as a success or reveal revenue.
So if you have already made huge investments in optimising your on-premises Linux HPC environments, you can now dynamically extend them to Azure when additional capacity is needed. The company has said that all its cloudy efforts – vCloud Air and its various SaaS plays – delivered about five per cent of revenue in Q4 2014, and are growing fast. Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of big data specialist Robin Systems, said there is a fair amount of application portability between cloud systems with containers. “But unless you get data portability, vendor lock-in is inevitable.” The reason, Madhavan said, is that it’s not in cloud vendors’ interest to make it easy for customers to move from one cloud system to another. “If you put 60 petabytes of data into a cloud system, you are locked in. Azure Batch, Microsoft’s service for job scheduling and compute management for large batch jobs based on the company’s acquisition of GreenButton last year, is also hitting general availability today.
The Reg’s virtualisation desk expects Redmond to make more manoeuvres soon, by outlining a cogent position for how it expects Windows Server users should operate their hybrid clouds. However, Microsoft has a significant advantage over VMware in public cloud, as Azure is widely seen as No. 2 behind market leader Amazon Web Services. All of these players preach the kumbaya vision of cross-cloud cooperation and hybrid-cloud goodness, while they also plot to steal customers from the other guys. Once Microsoft can explain just what fits where, and when and why, it will be able to match the vCloud Air story and offer a DR alternative to vSphere users who aren’t keen to put all their eggs in one basket. ® Many partners, some of which used to sell hosted Microsoft services on their own, see vendor-owned-and-operated clouds as a threat to their well being.
Gaurav Tewari, managing director of Citigroup Ventures, said it’s not a question of yes or no. “It’s going to depend on the type of company.” He also said vendor lock-in isn’t a bad thing if the company is giving the customer what it wants. Network configuration is also unlikely to survive conversion to Azure, especially as it lacks many of the vSphere networking capabilities,” said VMware in the document. For example, he noted that security is a big issue, and being able to show the ability to recover from a breach or other disaster—natural or otherwise—is a very big deal. “AWS has a great story there,” said Tewari. Kleinfeld of GridGain said the question of interoperability gets confused by different interpretations or references to what constitutes a cloud. “Everyone defines cloud differently, whether it’s AWS, or the Google Compute Engine.