The hybrid cloud isn’t just a cool, neat, novel thing anymore, it’s the go-to architecture for many. And those who aren’t onboard yet are definitely considering it. Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure with virtualization, software-defined networking, and more. But what separates it from the rest is it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Azure. No middleware. No separate on-premises and cloud management. It’s all in one place. A complete Microsoft stack from platform to cloud. And it’s never been easier to unify your on-premises infrastructure with the power of Azure.
Here are five hybrid cloud things you can do with Azure Stack HCI.
1. Monitor with complete visibility from on-premises to the cloud and everything in between
Windows Admin Center gives you powerful cluster-wide monitoring with a dashboard that graphically displays memory and CPU usage, storage capacity, IOPS, throughput, and latency in real-time, across every server in the cluster, with alerts when something is not right.
Windows Admin Center is also your gateway to hybrid cloud tools such as Azure Monitor, making it easy to monitor your Azure Stack HCI hybrid cloud deployments in Azure. Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of your applications and services by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry.
Windows Admin Center also supports third party extensions such as the DataON MUST visibility and management tool. It provides unique functionality, such as enhanced disk mapping, real-time e-mail alerts, and a call home service that integrates with Azure Analytics to provide real-time system monitoring for disk failures or predicted disk failures.
2. Simplify hybrid cloud management
Windows Admin Center delivers complete control to manage your on-premises hyper-converged infrastructure, software-defined networking, virtualization, Azure cloud services, and much more. Through Windows Admin Center, you can utilize tools such as Azure Resource Manager and Azure Arc.
Azure Resource Manager allows you to unify your cloud and on-premises operations. It delivers enterprise grade-access control to manage permissions, log all actions, and organize, manage, and visualize resources. You can also create templates for testing, staging, and production, and repeatedly deploy applications in a consistent state.
If you’re managing complex and distributed environments, like on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud, Azure Arc enables you to easily deploy Azure services and extend Azure management to any infrastructure.
3. Protect from physical disasters, hardware failures, data corruption, and ransomware with on-premises, hybrid cloud, or Azure for backup and recovery
Azure Stack HCI helps you achieve highly available on-premises and hybrid cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. If you want to avoid additional upfront infrastructure costs, you can setup a complete cloud backup and DR solution using Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery services.
You can use Azure File Sync to centrally organize, transition and synchronize files between Azure and an on-premises infrastructure. You can then choose whether you want to permanently move your backups, DR or file servers to Azure.
And Storage Migration Service simplifies migrating storage from Windows Server to Azure with a graphical interface that inventories data on Windows and Linux and then transfers the data to newer servers and Azure.
4. Strengthen security and protect against threats
As part of an Azure Stack HCI hybrid cloud solution, Azure Security Center detects and alerts you of threats to your environments, providing actionable recommendations for mitigating them.
Many organizations already use Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). Azure Security Center offers additional features for it like automated onboarding, which automatically enables Microsoft Windows Defender ATP sensors to be monitored by Azure Security Center with alerts in a single-pane-of-glass dashboard.
Azure Security Center also provides an alert process tree and incident graph as well as a detailed machine timeline that shows every behavior for a historical period up to six months.
5. Easily deploy and update Azure Stack HCI
Azure Stack HCI solutions from DataON are Microsoft-validated and easy to deploy. DataON provides detailed instructions, scripts, and a dedicated support team of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI experts for you to get up and stay running. Once you get started, you can use Windows Admin Center to deploy hyper-converged clusters and even stretch them across multiple on-prem sites without using PowerShell commands. With less fuss and muss on-premises, you can your launch hybrid cloud deployments faster.
Because Azure Stack HCI is natively integrated with Azure, you can easily and quickly choose the Azure services you want and deploy hybrid cloud deployments at will in Windows Admin Center without even using PowerShell commands.
Azure Stack HCI will become a new subscription-based model. That means it will always be up to date, eliminating the need to manually update and patch each server node. Even better, you receive security updates and new features seamlessly as soon as they are available.
If you’re looking to deploy a hybrid cloud solution for your data center, DataON can help you.
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