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Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports some of EMC’s enterprise storage systems, the companies announced.
ASR is Microsoft’s cloud-based disaster recovery offering. “With features such as synchronous and asynchronous replication support, protection and recovery of shared-disk guest clusters, multi-virtual machine consistency and [standards-based management] with SMI-S [Storage Management Initiative Specification], ASR provides enterprise-grade DR [disaster recovery] solutions for Hyper-V environments,” said Abhishek Agrawal, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, in a statement.
The product now works more seamlessly with environments powered by EMC’s wares, revealed Agrawal.
“ASR integration with EMC VMAX and VMAX3 series and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) is now generally available,” he stated, in a July 29 announcement eclipsed by the buzz surrounding the Windows 10 launch that same day. “The combination of Azure Site Recovery with EMC VMAX SRDF provides a robust, scalable yet simple end-to-end DR solution for Hyper-V environments.”
In a blog post, Stefan Voss, director of technical marketing for EMC Core Technologies, explained that SRDF software provides remote replication services in mission-critical environments. “Combining ASR and SRDF provides customers the ability to orchestrate replication, protection and failover of virtual machines across on-premises and their DR or Service Provider data centers,” he said.
Azure Site Recovery now helps provide those services for customers running EMC’s high-end VMAX storage systems. “As part of the integration work, a variety of scenarios were tested including: creation/protection of Recovery Groups, Failover, Reverse Replication, Un-Planned Failover, Test Failover, and a number of scalability tests and parallel operations,” said Voss.
Web App Makeover
On the Azure App Services front, the company announced interface improvements aimed at providing a responsive, more streamlined Web app monitoring and management experience. Azure App Services is a set a tools that enable developers to build cloud-based Web and mobile apps.
The Web app resource blade interface is faster after Microsoft issued an update, according to Byron Tardif, program manager of Microsoft Azure Websites. “In this particular update, we are singling out performance because we have managed to shave full seconds from the experience,” he said in a statement.
“These improvements translate into snappier navigation, more reliable resource blade loading and a better overall experience. We’ve also improved telemetry in places that will allow us to identify and proactively fix new performance bottlenecks or regressions,” Tardif continued
Navigation has been revamped to better expose functionality that was once buried deep in the interface. “We added the tools menu to the action bar as a way to provide quick access to the tools provided. Many of the tools in this menu, like Troubleshoot and ARM Explorer, have been around for some time but were not easy to find,” he said.
Other improvements include a new Java version selector and new utilization metrics in the App Service Environment resource view.
“We also now allow for creation of App Service Environments into smaller subnets,” a popular customer request, concluded Tardif.