Microsoft has expanded its Azure Stack family with new HCI offerings, designed for customers looking to run virtualised applications on modern hyperconverged infrastructure.
Geared towards lowering costs and improving performance, the Redmond firm's new Azure Stack HCI solutions deliver the same software-defined compute, storage and networking software as Azure Stack.
Organisations are able to run application workloads across both their own servers as well as the cloud, with Azure integration allowing for hybrid capabilities such as cloud-based backup, site recovery and monitoring, Microsoft said.
"While customers love the fact that they can run cloud applications on-premises with Azure Stack, we understand that most customers also run important parts of their organization on traditional virtualized applications," said Arpan Shah, general manager at Microsoft Azure. "Now we have a new option to deliver cloud efficiency and innovation for these workloads as well."
Launched back in 2017, Azure Stack remains the only solution on the market for customers wanting to run cloud applications using consistent IaaS and PaaS services via the public cloud, on-premises, as well as disconnected environments.
Now, businesses that opt for Azure Stack HCI solutions will also benefit from its high performance, Microsoft said, with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct running on the most current industry- standard x86 hardware.
There's also support for the latest hardware technologies such as NVMe drives, persistent memory and remote-direct memory access (RDMA) networking, whilst IT admins can leverage Windows Admin Center for simplified integration with Azure hybrid services.
"Adopting hybrid cloud is a journey and it is important to have a strategy that takes into account different workloads, skillsets, and tools," Shah added. "Microsoft is the only leading cloud vendor that delivers a comprehensive set of hybrid cloud solutions, so customers can use the right tool for the job without compromise."
Azure Stack HCI products have been made available through 15 Microsoft-validated hardware partners.
