Microsoft unleashes 'massive computing power' in UK data centres

New Microsoft Azure services that make it easier to work with huge amounts of information have been launched in the UK.

Thursday, 3rd August 2017 Posted 7 years ago in by Phil Alsop

G-Series, H-Series and N-Series virtual machines (VM), which allow developers to create multiple copies of their own computer to increase computing power, are now available in the company’s UK South data region.

This means Microsoft is the first hyperscale cloud provider offering VMs that can run graphics intensive workloads in the UK. It is also the first company to bring graphics processing units to data centres in this country.

The H-Series VM is designed for people working on complex engineering and scientific tasks that feature a lot of data, such as computational fluid dynamics, crash simulations, seismic exploration and weather forecasting simulations. It will allow this work to be done smoothly and quickly, without the lag and slowdown that some computers and virtual machines suffer from.

These VMs will be available in six different sizes, all based on Intel E5-2667 V3 3.2 GHz (with turbo up to 3.5 GHz) processor technology, utilizing DDR4 memory and SSD-based local storage.

Sam Mahalingam, Chief Technology Officer at design and technology firm Altair Engineering, which uses Microsoft’s H-Series VMs, said: “We are excited about the introduction of new non-hyper-threaded compute and network optimised H-series VMs in Azure. We worked closely with the Microsoft Team to test our solutions for performance and scaling on the H-Series VMs. Based on the testing, we are confident that we can not only deliver high performance to our customers but also provide deep integration with the Azure environment to enable HPC cloud environments.”

Graham Hill, Senior Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft, said: “Microsoft’s UK data centres offer unrivalled opportunities for companies of all sizes in this country to unlock their growth potential. We are seeing huge demand for our cloud services, as firms digitally transform to meet the needs of their customers. We are delighted to announce the release of the G-Series, H-Series and N-Series services in the UK, which are perfect for anyone wanting to unlock the business possibilities behind large amounts of information.”