Metered Usage for Azure Stack Infrastructure
Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0000
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Metered Usage for Azure Stack Infrastructure
When it comes to building modern applications and adopting a cloud operating model, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure. While the primary focus is the ability to develop and run Azure services in a Hybrid Environment, Microsoft has also brought the Azure economic model to Azure Stack with usage-based billing. At Dell EMC, our goal is to complete that experience by providing a metered usage consumption offering for the Dell EMC Cloud on Microsoft Azure Stack. Now with the recent introduction of Flex on Demand from Dell Financial Services (DFS), you have the option to pay for your Azure Stack Infrastructure based on the usage data from your Azure Stack Usage API Endpoint.
Capacity Planning and Flex capacity
An important consideration for many of our Hybrid Cloud customers is the ability to scale applications and services rapidly. This could apply to the ability to accommodate bursty workloads as well as scenarios where you see rapid growth yet keep some buffer capacity to cushion the impact of that growth. Our goal at Dell EMC is to provide you with the business model that accommodates both options softening the impact of time related to capacity planning.
Usage based billing consistent with Cloud Economics
Most of target personas for Hybrid cloud are focused on the application developer or the IT operator. As Hybrid Cloud adoption grows, a company’s finance, accounting along with procurement stakeholders are realizing the benefits of cloud economics. Eliminating the need to manage un-planned capital expenses, while benefiting from procurement of equipment as a service enables you to simplify accounting, free up cash flow and make procurement of new services more streamlined.
With Flex on Demand from DFS, consistent with Azure, your infrastructure charges are tied to usage and aligns with the OPEX type consumption models that customers desire. You pay Dell EMC for the services you consume plus a pre-negotiated fixed cost monthly. This covers the usage costs associated with the Hardware, Lifecycle Management SW and Maintenance while you continue to pay your subscription costs to Microsoft for the Azure Services running on Azure Stack.
Meters consistent with Azure
While metered service is a key tenet of Cloud computing, picking the right resources and meters is equally important. In discussing options with our customers, the consistency with Azure and the Cost transparency were highlighted as key goals. In keeping with the notion that Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, we applied a similar approach to the usage measurements and billing of the Azure Stack Infrastructure.
To do this, we extract and report back the per-subscription resources leveraging the usage API endpoints from Azure Stack Provider Resource API. Consistent with Azure Stack, we measure the VM Hours and capture the VM Type. From this data, we compute the resource consumption. Based on the Scale Unit Type (Balanced/All Flash), we then assign a rate and a bill is generated.
Whether you are looking for a financial model consistent with Azure or looking to keep some buffer capacity to accommodate growth, working with Dell Financial Services, we are delighted to bring this Measured Service capability to the full stack and in a way completing the final piece of the Hybrid cloud puzzle. For more information you can go to Flex On Demand from DFS.
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Azure Stack with PowerScale
Tue, 04 Aug 2020 14:52:59 -0000
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Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub has been at the forefront in bringing Azure to customer datacenters, enabling customers to operate their own region of Azure in a secure environment that addresses their data sovereignty and performance needs.
As data growth explodes at the edge, many of our customers are looking to process PB scale data in the context of file, image/video processing, analytics, simulation, and learning. With Azure Stack Hub, built on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the need for external storage to handle this growth in data was critical. Additionally, for applications that use file storage with CIFS/NFS today, Azure files storage service is currently not supported.
As we set out to identify the right storage subsystem that met our customers’ needs (with performance, multi-tenancy, multi-petabyte scale-out storage, and advanced data management features), we did not have to look far. Dell Technologies has a large product portfolio that enables us not only to integrate with other infrastructures but to innovate in other areas to deliver the Azure consistent experience our customers expect.
With newly announced Azure Stack Hub integration with Dell EMC PowerScale, customers can run their Azure IaaS and PaaS on-premises while connecting to data that is generated and stored locally. In the context of Azure consistency, depending on your application needs, there are two ways to consume this storage.
- Azure Consistent Storage (ACS): Applications that are using Azure Block Blob storage
- Integrated NAS (File Storage): NFS and CIFS
Here are some highlights about the choices and differences:
Regardless of your protocol of choice, you have two personas engaged:
- The Azure Stack Hub Cloud administrator (screen below) is responsible for creating offers, quotas, and plans to offer the underlying storage, via subscriptions, to Azure tenants.
- The Azure Stack tenant can consume storage and be metered and billed consistent with other Azure Services. All of this, without having to manage anything in PowerScale.
With this strategy, our customers can tap into external PB storage to consume Azure Block Blob or Files via CIFS/NFS while maintaining the Azure consistent experience. Additionally, for customers looking to keep their applications in the public cloud while maintaining their data on-premises, Dell Technologies Cloud PowerScale extends OneFS running on-prem to Azure.
To read more about it, see this solution brief:
Dell Technologies Cloud PowerScale: Microsoft Azure
With the work Dell Technologies has been doing with Azure and Azure Stack Hub, your data is secure and compliant. You also have the choice to run your application in Azure or Azure Stack Hub and connect to your on-prem data without sacrificing bandwidth or latency.
GPU-Accelerated AI and ML Capabilities
Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:37:06 -0000
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Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub has been extending Microsoft Azure services to customer-owned data centers for over three years. Our platform has enabled organizations to create a hybrid cloud ecosystem that drives application modernization and to address business concerns around data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.
Dell Technologies, in collaboration with Microsoft, is excited to announce upcoming enhancements that will unlock valuable, real-time insights from local data using GPU-accelerated AI and ML capabilities. Actionable information can be derived from large on-premises data sets at the intelligent edge without sacrificing security.
Partnership with NVIDIA
Today, customers can order our Azure Stack Hub dense scale unit configuration with NVIDIA Tesla V100S GPUs for running compute-intensive AI processes like inferencing, training, and visualization from virtual machine or container-based applications. Some customers choose to run Kubernetes clusters on their hardware-accelerated Azure Stack Hub scale units to process and analyze data sent from IoT devices or Azure Stack Edge appliances. Powered by the Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 rack server, these NVIDIA Tesla V100S GPUs use Discrete Device Assignment (DDA), also known as GPU pass-through, to dedicate one or more GPUs to an Azure Stack Hub NCv3 VM.
The following figure illustrates the resources installed in each GPU-equipped Azure Stack Hub dense configuration scale unit node.
This month, our Dell EMC Azure Stack Hub release 2011 will also support the NVIDIA T4 GPU – a single-slot, low-profile adapter powered by NVIDIA Turing Tensor Cores. These GPUs are perfect for accelerating diverse cloud-based workloads, including light machine learning, inference, and visualization. These adapters can be ordered with Dell EMC Azure Stack Hub all-flash scale units powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 rack servers. Like the NVIDIA Tesla V100S, these GPUs use DDA to dedicate one adapter’s powerful capabilities to a single Azure Stack Hub NCas_v4 VM. A future Azure Stack Hub release will also enable GPU partitioning on the NVIDIA T4.
The following figure illustrates the resources installed in each GPU-equipped Azure Stack Hub all-flash configuration scale unit node.
Partnership with AMD
We are also pleased to announce a partnership with AMD to deliver GPU capabilities in our Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub. Available today, customers can order our dense scale unit configuration with AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs aimed at graphics intensive visualization workloads like simulation, CAD applications, and gaming. The MI25 uses GPU partitioning (GPU-P) technology to allow users of an Azure Stack Hub NVv4 VM to consume only a portion of the GPU’s resources based on their workload requirements.
The following table is a summary of our hardware acceleration capabilities.
An engineered approach
Following our stringent engineered approach, Dell Technologies goes far beyond considering GPUs as just additional hardware components in the Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub portfolio. We apply our pedigree as leaders in appliance-based solutions to the entire lifecycle of all our scale unit configurations. The dense and all-flash scale unit configurations with integrated GPUs are designed to follow best practices and use cases specifically with Azure-based workloads, rather than workloads running on traditional virtualization platforms. Dell Technologies is also committed to ensuring a simplified experience for initial deployment, patch and update, support, and streamlined operations and monitoring for these new configurations.
Additional considerations
There are a couple of additional details worth mentioning about our new Azure Stack Hub dense and all-flash scale unit configurations with hardware acceleration:
- The use of the GPU-backed N-Series VMs in Azure Stack Hub for compute-intensive AI and ML workloads is still in preview. Dell Technologies is very interested in speaking with customers about their use cases and workloads supported by this configuration. Please contact us at mhc.preview@dell.com to speak with one of our engineering technologists.
- The Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub configurations with GPUs can be delivered fully racked and cabled in our Dell EMC rack. Customers can also elect to have the scale unit components re-racked and cabled in their own existing cabinets with the assistance of Dell Technologies Services.
Resources for further study
- At the time of publishing this blog post, only the NCv3 and NVv4 VMs are available in the Azure Stack Hub marketplace. The NCas_v4 currently is not visible in the portal. Please proceed to the Azure Stack Hub User Documentation for more information on these VM sizes.
- Customers may want to explore the Train Machine Learning (ML) model at the edge design pattern in the Azure Hybrid Documentation. This may prove to be a good starting point for putting this technology to work for their organization.
- Customers considering running AI and ML workloads on Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub can also greatly benefit from storage-as-a-service with Dell EMC PowerScale. PowerScale can help enable faster training and validation of AI models, improve model accuracy, drive higher GPU utilization, and increase data science productivity. Visit Artificial Intelligence with Dell EMC PowerScale for more information.