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(A complete transcript is available below.)
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Another month, another great #AzureGovMeetup in Washington, D.C. Last week’s Meetup was all about the hybrid cloud (storing data both on-premises and in the cloud), a critical part of government IT transformation.
Keeping up with ever-changing IT environments is a challenge for most organizations, so we discussed how agencies can gain visibility and control across their hybrid cloud, along with choosing the right tools, management and recovery, and improving security and protection. The Meetup also featured updates on the latest technologies and upcoming plans from the recent Microsoft Build 2017 conference.
AIS’ CTO and Azure MVP Vishwas Lele and Cloud Architect Harin Sandhoo both gave great presentations, along with Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect, Brian Harrison. In case you missed it (or want to watch again), you can watch the entire Meetup right here: Read More…
Modern cloud computing offers enterprises unprecedented opportunities to manage their IT infrastructure and applications with agility, resiliency, and security, while at the same time realizing significant cost savings. The ability to rapidly scale up and down in the cloud opens countless doors of possibility to use compute and storage resources in innovative ways that were not previously feasible.
But getting to the cloud and managing both cloud and on-premises resources can be a daunting challenge. As a recent Gartner article explains, a Cloud Strategy is a must for organizations. That’s where we at AIS can help – we have years of experience and successes working with enterprises to develop a cloud strategy. We have the resources and expertise to then plan and execute, leveraging the latest technologies and best practices.
This announcement also represents a major chunk of Microsoft’s family of Azure offerings…and in my opinion, a stepping stone many companies simply must take in moving out of the traditional data center and into the cloud. The following diagram shows the stepping stones out of the traditional data center:
Congratulations to StorSimple for building an innovative product that Microsoft was recently inspired to acquire. For those of you who have not had a chance to look into StorSimple yet, it offers an interesting hybrid storage capability: on-premises storage, combined with Windows Azure-based storage. Simply drop their storage appliance in your network and start using it as a storage device. You can expect capabilities similar to any enterprise-class storage device, including high availability through dual-controllers, battery-backed memory and RAID.
Under the covers, however, the StorSimple appliance will seamlessly spread your data between its three types of storage: high performance flash SSDs, high-capacity SAS disk drives and Windows Azure-based cloud storage — essentially giving you access to virtually unlimited amounts of storage. However, the technique to automatically move the data between high-cost and media is not new. For years, the industry has referred to this technique as HSM – Hierarchical Storage Management, or tiered storage. However, HSM products such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Oracle’s SAM-QFS are considered high-end products and are typically outside the reach of most small- to medium-sized businesses. This is why some believe that StorSimple may have an opportunity to bring HSM to the masses.
So why is this interesting? Read More…
In the past, I have written about the benefits of Platform as a Service (PaaS) style of applications. While I continue to believe that PaaS offers the best ROI for hosting custom applications in the cloud, there are a number of scenarios where inserting elements of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to a PaaS solution can help alleviate some of the limitations that have prevented the adoption of PaaS. In this blog post we will look at a few compelling scenarios that are enabled by combining PaaS with the recently announced IaaS features within a Windows Azure Cloud Service. Read More…
