-: [Inspirational Music]
-: Hello everyone.
I'm Asad Khan and I'm the head
of product management for sequel and hybrid data services.
I'm so glad to see how customers
and partners are accelerating their digital transformation,
finding innovative ways to be more productive,
agile, and resilient.
Since we previewed Azure Arc enabled data services,
we have been working
with our early adopter customers to understand
and validate their hybrid use cases.
It has been a humbling journey for us to learn and adapt.
So our solutions can support your needs; not only
for existing applications, but also
for the future strategy around microservices and containers.
The reality is that data sovereignty regulations
and latency continue to drive the need
for distributed compute
across customer data centers, multi-cloud, and the edge.
Therefore, cloud-based data solutions that deliver
consistency, portability, and unified management
across the state will help you to improve productivity,
drive down costs, and unlock the data insights
at the location where data is created.
We have started with Azure SQL
and Azure Postgres sequel databases running
on any infrastructure
and any Kubernetes providing that cloud experience
for your data workloads across, on-prem, and the clouds.
First, that experience includes unique Azure innovation
with an evergreen SQL that has no end of support.
It also means we will continue to bring the
latest capabilities from the cloud
to the customer manage infrastructure on a regular basis.
Second, it comes in the form of a service.
You will have all the built-in management capabilities
Whenever you provision a database;
such as high availability, backup, restore, et cetera,
just like on Azure.
Those routine DBA tasks will be fully automated at scale.
Third, it will allow database workloads
on your own infrastructure to elastically scale
without application downtime.
So you can optimize workload performance
and the infrastructure utilization.
This means you don't need to
pre-purchase a footprint based
on the projected peak use for the next three years.
You can run based on the actual needs, scaling up, down,
or scaling out accordingly.
Of course, we will provide you with a single pane
of glass across all deployments of your data workloads
and make hybrid an integral part of the Azure experience
with the tools that you are already familiar with.
Last but not the least,
we are the only cloud provider that supports
your data workloads regardless of your connectivity mode.
You will enjoy the same benefits for your remote locations,
with or without the continuous data connection to Azure.
With that, I am thrilled to announce
that Azure SQL enabled by Azure Arc
will be generally available on July 30th, 2021,
and customers can start
with the general purpose tier made available
across all Azure regions.
Azure arc enabled PostgreS hyperscale is
in preview and will become available generally soon.
Now let's hear the story
from one of our preview customers SKF
and I would like to welcome Sven
who is the head of digital manufacturing at SKF group.
Hello, Sven.
We are so glad to have you join our session
and share your team's experience.
We have heard Victoria speaking
to SKF business priorities and wonder
could you share more about your project and your challenges?
-: I'm absolutely stoked to be here with you, Asad.
And for sure. I can share something about our journey.
We are on a journey leveraging digitalization to
improve operational efficiency
across all SKF manufacturing units.
As you can see, I'm joining you from one of our factories
in Sweden, where we have the SKF headquarters.
We call this journey lean digital transformation
and this for sure has some challenges.
Challenges that could be broken down
into two different categories.
We have organizational challenge, first of all.
The challenge in organization comes down
to building continuous adaptation, ability to
adopt digitalization technologies, to increase the
operational efficiency and strive
for data-driven manufacturing.
And the second challenge is the technological platform
that needs to be supporting this.
Digital transformation
is often characterized as too technical.
And technology is really one of the key aspects
that needs to be sorted so that it doesn't draw when
it's not properly sorted.
It draws the focus out from the organizational challenge
and the organizational transformation,
and by doing that, it jeopardizes
you getting the outcomes that you're after.
-: You mentioned one of the goals
is to build the next generation
of factories with data-driven manufacturing.
Can you share more on why you chose Azure Arc enabled SQL,
and how's your experience so far?
-: Absolutely.
So, to stay competitive and to serve our customers
in today's rapidly changing and challenging markets,
you need the smartest, most flexible, the most
efficient batteries in the world.
Our factories require IT OT platforms that are stable
and have IT services deployed there with speed.
And we require reliability to support the critical
manufacturing systems, but we are running on them.
We have one hundreds factories at SKF,
so we need these kinds of platforms also to the right POS.
With Azure hybrid solutions, we get just that.
Services like Azure Arc SQL
managed instance is providing us a worry-free
and maintenance-free SQL operations.
-: I'm so honored by what you just said.
And in fact, I'm interested to see how this works
for one of your applications on your shop floor.
-: Let's have a look.
So what we see in here, is Azure data studio connected
to one of the SQL managed instances.
In this case, this SQL instance is located
in a Azure stack HCI in Airasca, Italy.
Let's have a look how this is configured.
In the settings you can see that the CPU request
for this SQL managed instance is set to two.
What I want to tell you is how we're delivering these
in a declarative manner.
So let's switch over to the Azure DevOps where you can see
in the Git report, the declarations.
And in a declaration, you can see here, clearly,
that the CPU requests are set to two.
So let's change that into three
and make that comment into the Git.
Next we switch over to Argo CD.
So Argo CD is an open source tool that we are
using to support the continuous delivery.
Basically, it connects to the Git Repo
and reads the declarations from there,
and then it applies that into the Kubernetes.
So let's filter down into the right service here.
So we see we're connected here into the Airasca Argo CD
and we see SQL managed instance.
And we see here immediately
that there is a new declaration available.
Let's have a look at that.
Here you can see the live manifest
which is representing what is live in production right now.
And then also the desired manifest,
which is reflecting the changes that we just made.
And in a DIFF you can see what got changed between the two.
We would normally have this synchronization enabled
as an automatic background process,
but for the sake of the demo,
we're going to be synchronizing the changes here manually,
and then we're going to grab a cup of coffee
while it's updating the bots.
So, after the bots are restarted, we can see
that all services are running according to the declarations.
What we can do now is that we can
switch back to the Azure data studio
and we can refresh the settings here, and see how they
go through it back in the SQL managed instance.
And here you can see the SQL as the CPU request
is now set to three.
Now the coolest thing about this;
while we were doing this,
while we were looking at this and making those code changes,
pushing that down, and getting that propagated into
the Argo CD and appoint, and the Kubernetes pulls through,
we have this application running in the
the Airasca factory the whole time.
And the application was running there, uninterrupted.
but this is a really good example of
what the hybrid cloud can do to us.
And this is a tremendous jumpstart for us.
-: Sven, nothing excites me more than seeing how customers
like you are using our solution to achieve your goals.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience,
and we will work hard to bring more data
and analytics innovation in the future.
-: Thank you, Asad.
We really appreciate the partnership with Microsoft
and we cannot wait for the new capabilities to come up
with the elastic scale and distributed availability sets.
That's going to be making this an even more
operationally reliable platform.
-: Thank you, Sven.
It was really nice to talk to you.
In support of Azure Arc enabled data services GA,
we are happy to announce an extensive network of
trusted partners ready to help with your
data state modernization.
Our partners have worked closely with our team to
validate their Azure Arc hybrid solution and deliver
to customers the latest innovation on any infrastructure.
We have partnered with industry leading service
and technology partners to help customers manage cloud
native app deployment at scale and across multiple clouds
integrate with cloud native platforms
and deliver purpose built solution for data
and AI and x-ray data modernization
and create hyper-converged infrastructure solutions
by combining highly optimized hardware
and solution platforms.
To showcase one such partners
at the intersection of hardware and software optimization,
I would like to bring up Matt Baker, senior vice president
of strategy and planning at Dell technologies.
Good morning, Matt.
We are so glad to have you join our session
and share your team's experience.
-: Thanks Asad, it's great to be here.
And, you know, I should just start by saying, you know
Dell and Microsoft have a long
and storied history between us; decades of experience
of bringing critical solutions to our customers to
solve their business and organizational needs.
So it's fabulous to be here.
And we've had some really recent examples
of these joint innovations from the launch
of Azure stack hub, to Azure stack HCI,
and working together on some
of the most challenging big cluster data problems, right?
The crunching of this onslaught
of data that we have.
Our work together on Azure arc enabled data services
is clearly a natural extension of that, of our long,
deep, standing partnership and to help solve the
challenges that our customers are facing today
with the unique challenges of hybrid environments.
-: I agree Matt, the partnership is amazing
and the value we have delivered to our customers.
And as we are building the foundation of hybrid together,
tell me more about how Dell is viewing
the Arc enabled data services opportunities.
-: Well, I think between the both of us,
we're working to ensure that regardless
of where our customers applications are running
and therefore their data resides, we want it to just work
be it in the public cloud, private cloud, at the edge
in this sort of third premises
of everything out in the world around us.
So we're excited
that Arc enabled data services will help our customers
vastly simplify the deployment management and governance
of their data across Azure SQL, Azure PostgreS.
And this creates a really agile
and flexible environment that allows you across that edge,
core, and cloud to really develop new breakthrough
applications that drive your business forward.
-: That's super exciting.
Tell me more about how you validate your platform
for Azure arc.
-: Yeah, we have a significant effort underway
around validating our infrastructure solutions
overall to enable seamless integration, high performance
with these Azure enabled data services,
Azure SQL, Azure Postgres.
And today we're excited to announce
that a number of our platforms have been tested
and validated for these Arc enabled data services
including the Azure stack solution,
Azure stack HCI solution, that I mentioned already
our VxRail solutions, our powerflex solutions,
power max solutions, and power store platforms.
In addition, we have a number
of services that allow our customers to better
design these hybrid environments
and deploy them in practicality.
So we are really investing deeply, and ensuring
that we can get these Azure enabled data services
out in the world around us.
-: Matt, that is so great to hear.
We are excited to continue our partnership and to
bring the hybrid solution that matters to our customers.
But where can people go and find out more
about the solution Dell is offering?
-: Well, there's a blog for that, of course.
So it'd be great to just go visit blog.dell.com to
learn more about what we're doing
around Azure Arc and Azure Arc enabled data services.
-: Great. Thank you Matt, for your time today.
Now let's unpack on how we price
the new offering of Azure SQL enabled by Azure Arc.
As I mentioned, we will provide you a cloud billing model
for better cost efficiency.
Under this model, we provide both
a consumption-based billing, or pay as you go,
and the capacity based billing, with reserved instance.
This will allow you to choose
from either OPEX or CapEx, based on your needs.
It will also present saving
if you choose to go with a longer term commitment
for workloads with predictable use patterns.
For existing SQL server customers with software assurance,
we will provide the same set of Azure hybrid benefits,
as you can have significant saving
from reusing your SQL licenses.
Combining the long-term commitment
and Azure hybrid benefits, you can get a discount
of up to 87%.
On top of the flexibility to go with OPEX or CapEx,
our goal is to unlock savings for you even further.
The set of cloud benefits will help eliminate costs
with automation at scale and built-in capabilities.
And the fact that you can run those cloud native databases,
gives you the ability to
reuse the infrastructure you already have paid for.
As Ryan mentioned, that Azure SQL enabled
by Azure Arc being generally available.
We want to truly change the paradigm
on how data workloads are run in on-premises settings.
This release, together with all future
Arc enabled data services with evolved
from a traditional point in time to the cloud practice
of continuous updates for features and capabilities.
A point in time release means you are given a fixed set
of features at a certain time, and then have to wait
for another 18 to 24 months before getting the next set
at a critical mass.
For Azure Arc enabled data services, however,
the release will follow Azure cloud practice
where we deliver new features
and capabilities on a regular basis.
Right when we GA the general purpose tier
of Azure Arc enabled SQL managed instance,
we will also maintain a strong pipeline of preview features
which customers can adopt and get support from Microsoft.
For example, a customer who wants to run fully
connected mode will adopt the previous service and by
September, they will see their deployments become GA grade.
In summary, we will continue to bring new features
for preview and then GA those features as we go.
As you can see from the release roadmap,
immediately after GA, we plan to keep rolling in
more mission critical high availability capabilities.
So you can have the peace of mind.
By November, customers can expect to get the
business critical service tier for Azure SQL
to be generally available.
July 30th will just be the start.