As a new normal has been defined by a worldwide pandemic and economic changes this year, businesses have sought new ways to optimize the delivery of their goods and services and better IT cost efficiency in an increasingly remote work environment.
The technology that lays the foundation for remote work, hyperconverged infrastructure, has long been an ideal way for organizations to deliver key workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), IT for remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) and for companies to drive datacenter modernization. Azure Stack HCI delivers on these customer needs with the innovation of Azure integration. With our cloud-native approach, our goal is to help customers realize higher value HCI through quick deployment and integration that leverages familiar management and tools with flexible Azure subscription pricing.
Customers and partners benefit from Azure Stack HCI innovations today
With the general availability of Azure Stack HCI today, we’ve taken the great feedback customers provided in preview to deliver a full-featured offering that includes centralized management, stretch clustering, built in hybrid capabilities, and Azure Arc integration. Our approach is resonating with customers and partners alike, including integrated system partners DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. Customers across many verticals, including Benenden Schools, Bradley Legal, the Cherokee County School District, Florida State Medical College of Medicine, and Hendrick Motorsports have already seen success with Azure Stack HCI through participation in preview and have achieved business value from Azure Stack HCI in driving early production deployment for multiple use cases including ROBO, database workloads, and datacenter modernization in general. Read the customer experience blog.
Do more with the new Azure Stack HCI and integrated systems
The innovations delivered by Azure Stack HCI open a wide range of customer scenarios. For example, simplifying hybrid with native Azure integration provides visibility of the clusters in the Azure Portal for hybrid management. Another key innovation is the newly built-in stretched clustering capabilities to easily enhance a customer disaster recovery strategy. See this technical video to learn more.
As customers are looking to minimize their time to value when deploying new infrastructure, Microsoft has worked with its partners to deliver a new integrated system experience for Azure Stack HCI as one of the form factors available. These integrated systems are shipping as pre-racked, with software, hardware, and firmware pre-installed and a simple deployment GUI. The new Azure Stack HCI full stack updates feature is integrated with each of the partner systems, bringing one click orchestration when new features or security updates need to be applied to the cluster. The system administrator is always in control, and always gets the latest features and validated full-stack updates.
Partner ecosystem
Today’s general availability also marks multiple integrated systems from our trusted partners such as DataON, Dell Technologies, and Lenovo. These Azure Stack HCI integrated systems have been co-engineered for enterprise-ready reliability and simplicity.
“As a partner that made the “Microsoft choice” we are bullish about the new simplicity and ease of use that Azure Stack HCI integrated systems bring to our customers. We have worked hand in hand with Microsoft to deliver a seamless experience on our new DataON AZS product line with DataON MUST Pro for Windows Admin Center. MUST Pro simplifies deployment and updating on Azure Stack HCI with minimal disruption to your hybrid cloud infrastructure. We believe that all industry verticals can benefit from the innovation delivered by such a system.” —Howard Lo, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, DataON
“With a long-standing history of bringing products to market with Microsoft, we are introducing the Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI built on trusted Dell EMC PowerEdge server technology. As part of our industry leading hyperconverged portfolio, this all-in-one, jointly engineered system delivers an Azure hybrid cloud consumption experience for customers with integrated deployment and full-stack automated lifecycle management.” —Jon Siegal, Vice President of Product Marketing, Dell Technologies
“Lenovo is looking forward to bringing Microsoft Azure Stack HCI integrated form factor to Lenovo’s most popular servers and Edge server lineup. Our joint partnership with Microsoft delivers a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution that helps our mutual customers accelerate their cloud journey. The hybrid capabilities and seamless integration with Azure is a perfect complement to the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX product line.” —Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager, Server, Storage, and Software Defined Infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group
Another great way to deploy Azure Stack HCI is using the Intel Select Solution offerings that deliver lots of flexibility.
“Azure Stack HCI reimagines hybrid cloud for enterprises with newfound simplicity in how IT can access Azure services based on what makes sense for their business, whether that is onpremises or in the cloud. The Intel Select Solutions for Azure Stack HCI are market-ready solutions delivered by a breadth of partners, extensively tested and performance verified to further simplify deployment while giving customers the scale and efficiency needed for a modern infrastructure to advance their business.” —Jason Grebe, Corporate Vice President, General Manager, Cloud Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel.
In addition, today’s general availability also brings new Independent Software Vendor support for Azure Stack HCI with CommVault, DataDog, Veeam and Veritas—now all fully operable with Azure Stack HCI to give our customers an even broader choice of tools.
Next steps
- Register for Azure Stack HCI software including the free 30-day trial.
- Read the technical blog with video demos.
- Come learn in more detail the diversity of solutions available from Microsoft partners and hear from Microsoft and partner executives. Mark your calendar for the Azure Stack HCI Partners Solutions Showcase on February 10, 2021 – more information coming soon.