Home Enterprise Podcast #87: What’s Next for Azure Stack HCI with Cosmos Darwin

Podcast #87: What’s Next for Azure Stack HCI with Cosmos Darwin

by Brian Beeler

Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI offering has grown up a lot in the last year. We’ve looked at the solution a few times both from Dell and DataON. In fact, we just posted a review of DataON’s AZS-6224 Integrated Systems. We gave the solution an Editor’s Choice Award again. The new 3rd Gen Xeon CPUs, Gen4 Intel SSDs, and the updated Azure Stack HCI OS from Microsoft make a very compelling offering that in our case, saw over 4 million IOPS out of a base three-node configuration and only 15 Intel P5510 SSDs.

Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI offering has grown up a lot in the last year. We’ve looked at the solution a few times both from Dell and DataON. In fact, we just posted a review of DataON’s AZS-6224 Integrated Systems. We gave the solution an Editor’s Choice Award again. The new 3rd Gen Xeon CPUs, Gen4 Intel SSDs, and the updated Azure Stack HCI OS from Microsoft make a very compelling offering that in our case, saw over 4 million IOPS out of a base three-node configuration and only 15 Intel P5510 SSDs.

data on azs-6224 intel ssd

While Microsoft has loved to show off its performance edge in the past, now it’s about maturing the software offering on a few fronts. First is the aforementioned HCI OS. This is critical because now Microsoft treats HCI as a product, not as a feature within Windows Server. Second, Microsoft is spending a lot of time bringing cloud features like AKS to the on-prem HCI offering. There’s also a major update coming very soon dubbed 21H2 that will bring a ton of new features to the platform, like GPU support.

On this podcast, I talk with Cosmos Darwin, the guru of HCI at Microsoft. He lays out a general update as to where we are with Azure Stack HCI today, but also where we’re going including some of the key highlights from 21H2. We touch on hardware benefits, what’s going on at the edge, containers, a new longer HCI trial, and much more.

Keep up on the latest including the 22H2 preview build on the Azure Stack blog.

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