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Elsewhere in the world, these VMs are being used by train company Trenitalia to analyse information in real-time, the city of Cape Town to run an emergency policing solution, and fleet management firm ARI to let customers track and report on every detail of its operation.
The M-series supports up to 128 virtual central processing units (vCPU) and between one and 3.8 tebibytes of RAM – a tebibyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes – on a single VM. It also offers up to 20 terabytes of memory – the most offered by any public cloud.
Data can also be transferred between VMs at up to 30 gigabytes per second, making it easy for companies to back up files or replicate their databases.
The VMs are the only ones in the UK able to handle large workloads on the SAP HANA platform. In December, Microsoft expanded its partnership with enterprise software company SAP to help firms move to the cloud and digitally transform their business. Firms including Coca-Cola, Columbia Sportswear and Costco have already said the move will benefit their operations.
Microsoft has also announced Dv3 VMs in UK data centres. These are built using new technology, so can perform better and more efficiently, enabling Microsoft to pass these savings on to customers who store data and run apps in the cloud for their businesses.
“By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, we are able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings that we are passing on to our customers,” said Jon Beck, Principle Program Manager at Microsoft.
They will cost up to 28% less than the previous VMs – Dv2.
The Dv3 VMs use “hyper-threading technology” on Intel processors, which allows users to run several processes at once. Along with the new Ev3 VMs, they are some of the first to run on Windows Server 2016 hosts, and also boast nested virtualization – the ability to run a VM inside another VM.
The Dv3s offer up to 64 vCPUs and 256 gigabytes of RAM, while Ev3s offer 432GB of RAM, giving customers more computer memory to run larger workloads.
Microsoft has also announced B-series VMs, a new low-cost range that offers customers flexibility in how much Azure computer power they use.
Some people only need a small amount of cloud computing power to run their business, but they will see occasional spikes in demand that require more CPUs. The B-series is designed to meet the needs of these users, letting them build up Azure credits as they pay for low-level usage of Microsoft’s cloud service. These credits can then be exchanged for more computing power when those spikes in demand occur.
“These VM sizes allow you to pay and burst as needed, using only a fraction of the CPU when you don’t need it and burst up to 100% of the CPU when you do need it,” said Corey Sanders, Director of Compute at Azure. “This level control gives you extreme cost flexibility and flexible value.”
