Blog

Nov 18

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Post-Show

Post Show Recap

What a week for Team DataON at Microsoft Ignite 2019! It was great to be with 30,000 Microsoft enthusiasts to learn about the latest developments in Microsoft technologies.

There’s so much momentum for Azure Stack HCI now. Thanks to everyone who came by our booth and the Western Digital booth to talk about solutions for Azure Stack HCI.

Over 200 people that came to the live drawing for our custom Giant Trinity triathlon bike. Congrats to the lucky winner!

Azure Arc and hybrid cloud offerings

Azure Arc is a new hybrid and multi-cloud platform. It helps customers manage on-premises and multi-cloud environments using Azure interface and tools. You can organize and govern across environments with organizational policies for VMs that may not be in a domain or even running Windows. These VMs can easily start sending log data to Azure Monitor for alerts and analytics. Additional features such as managing Kubernetes apps and manage data services (such as SQL DBs) are currently in private preview.

Azure Arc is also the overarching management layer for new hybrid cloud offerings, including Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure Stack Edge.

Azure Stack Edge is a server-as-a-service for edge computing that is shipped to you from Microsoft. There’s no minimum commit, pay for it on a month-to-month basis, and ship it back when you don’t need it anymore.

Azure Stack Hub is a local instance of Azure in your data center. It runs a local instance of Azure Resource Manager and Azure Portal so you can run IaaS and PaaS services.

Watch the Microsoft Ignite presentation: Introducing Azure Arc (BRK2208)

Azure Stack HCI

Microsoft announced five uses cases for Azure Stack HCI. The goal is to make it easier for customers to find solutions that are optimized for specific apps and scenarios. These broad categories include:

  • Branch office and edge
  • Virtual desktop infrastructure
  • High-performance SQL Server
  • Trusted enterprise virtualization
  • Scale-out storage

DataON was highlighted by Microsoft for our ultra-dense scale-out storage solutions. Azure Stack HCI is unique in the HCI space because it can support external JBODs. One customer that’s taking advantage of this capability is The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, who is deploying a DataON solution with over 2PB bulk storage.

Also highlighted was Storage Review’s review of Azure Stack HCI with DataON hardware. Storage Review found performance with Azure Stack HCI was over 4x faster than VMware (4k random read) and over 6x faster than VMware using SQL Server!

Learn more about DataON solutions for Azure Stack HCI

See how The Canadian Museum for Human Rights turned to Azure Stack HCI to help power its interactive museum gallery and online experience

Windows Server 2019

Windows Server vNext Insider Preview Build 19008 is now availableThis release supports stretched clusters that make it easier to support clusters in multiple physical locations. It also supports a larger maximum storage capacity so you can utilize larger hard drives. You can now store up to 16PB, which is 4x more than before.

 

Watch the Microsoft presentations:

Window Admin Center

Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Admin Center, version 1910, with new dashboards for use with Azure Stack HCI. It now supports performance monitoring and has a new deployment wizard. It also supports hybrid cloud service integration with Azure Monitor and Azure Site Recovery.

Windows Admin Center now has over 120,00 active monthly and 3M+ servers managed monthly!

Download Windows Admin Center 1910

DataON MUST 3.0 for Windows Admin Center

DataON MUST is our visibility, management, and monitoring tool that we originally created for Windows Server 2016 environments. Now in its second generation as an extension for Windows Admin Center, MUST now features:

  • A redesigned dashboard gives you an overview of your Azure Stack HCI environment
  • Enhanced disk mapping of your entire node, including number of disks, disk type, location, and disk health status
  • Alert services that provide real-time email alerts to systems administrators
  • New call home service that integrates alert services with Azure Analytics to provide real-time monitoring for disk failures
  • New diagnostics deployment tool to simplify installation of your new Azure Stack HCI environment

Learn more

View the DataON MUST 3.0 demo

Microsoft Ignite: The Tour

Microsoft Ignite is now going on the road to a city near you! Each stop will have two days of tech events.

DataON will be going to Toronto (January 8-9), Amsterdam (March 11-12), Chicago (April 15-16), and Berlin (April 29-30).

We’ll even have our custom DataON triathlon bike from Microsoft Ignite 2019 on display. Make sure to register early to save your seat!

Are you ready for Azure Stack HCI?

If you’re thinking about deploying an Azure Stack HCI solutions, contact us and we’ll help you get started on your Microsoft journey!