Why Azure™ Stack HCI and NCR?
Companies across all markets and geographies are starting to recognize that the reality of today's business needs dictates a hybrid approach to their network and computing infrastructures. The transition from a “cloud first" model to one that is “cloud smart" is rapidly coming into fashion. At the same time, new application demands are driving tremendous growth in Edge computing. However, these transitions bring with them two significant challenges. The first is the ability to scale to meet the exponential growth associated with Edge Compute, and the second is the complexity of managing Hybrid environments consisting of on-premises, private and public cloud.
As a Microsoft® Azure™ Stack HCI partner, NCR understands the challenges facing businesses globally, especially as we modernize our enterprise infrastructures to thrive in a digital world. Whether running workloads as part of a hybrid-cloud operation or expanding computing resources at the edge, NCR brings global expertise and the leadership needed to design, deploy, and manage Azure Stack HCI and Edge. With over 13,000 field engineers in 160 countries and 7,000 remote experts in Network Operations Centers across the globe, NCR is your choice for Azure Stack HCI and infrastructure solutions.
When it comes to Compute, Cloud and Connect, NCR’s unique ability to deploy and maintain Azure Stack HCI devices across geographical boundaries and centrally manage, monitor, and optimize performance at scale are what sets us apart.
Contact us today to learn more about NCR’s Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc solutions.
What is Azure Stack HCI?
As organizations are looking to simplify data centers, move computing to the edge, and integrate with the cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is radically simplifying data center architectures and hybrid cloud deployments. When teamed with Azure Stack HCI, Microsoft’s new OS that natively integrates hybrid cloud, it simplifies deployment, increases flexibility, lowers cost, and generally helps an organization do more with less. NCR experts can help drive down those costs and improve efficiency with our premier global Azure Stack HCI design and deployment services.
The Azure Stack HCI OS runs on HCI validated hardware from your favored hardware partner and integrates natively with Microsoft Azure and Azure Arc for one unified ecosystem. Azure Stack HCI is delivered as an Azure subscription service with automated updates guarantying the latest security and features on your on-premises servers (infrastructure) that you own, control, and manage.
What is Azure Arc?
Most organizations today have services running both on-premises and on multiple public cloud platforms with no integration between these distributed services. Each platform requires different toolsets to administer, and different skill sets to manage, resulting in compute environments that are infinitely more complex to run.
Enter Azure Arc.
Azure Arc extends native Azure management, monitoring, and security tools to your on-premises environment and even third-party public clouds such as AWS. With Arc customers can have a single toolset and pane-of-glass interface to implement consistent management, governance, and security for all your resources across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With a comprehensive toolset, years of experience, and thousands of customers, NCR can help you manage and monitor your hybrid cloud environment with Azure Arc.
When to use Azure Stack HCI?
- Modernize and secure your datacenter
- Run intelligent edge and remote branch solutions
- Deploy high performance workloads
- Deploy cloud-native apps and Azure Arc-enabled services
Modernize and secure your datacenter
Traditional datacenter infrastructure can’t keep up with the speed of business today. In today’s world, being forced to manage separate silos for compute, network, storage, and virtualization makes it too slow and complex. With HCI’s modern approach to software defined storage and software defined networking, there are no more silos. Instead, just integrated hardware that is centrally managed and hybrid cloud enabled by design.
Run intelligent edge and remote branch solutions
Azure Stack HCI offers a small resource footprint at the edge for either a Small Office Branch Office (SOB) environment looking to run traditional business applications on virtual machines, or serving as an IoT edge device for ML, analytics, and valuable business insights. All of this can be accomplished while being managed and monitored centrally from a single Azure portal.
Deploy high performance workloads
Azure Stack HCI offers a high-performing, scalable, and manageable platform for implementing Microsoft SQL Server at an affordable price point. It can host Windows VMs and Linux VM’s giving you the freedom to run either Windows or Linux versions of SQL Server depending on your needs. Equipped with integrated backup and business continuity solutions, including native stretch clustering capability, setting up disaster recovery for SQL without the need for manual intervention has never been easier.
Deploy cloud-native apps and Azure Arc-enabled services
Azure Stack HCI supports deploying Kubernetes based workloads running Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Whether in the data center or at the edge, AKS and Azure Stack HCI integration are ideal for running containerized workloads within on-premises environments. Moreover, with Azure Arc, you can navigate to the Azure Portal to visualize and manage Kubernetes workload clusters running on Azure Stack HCI, side by side with native AKS clusters running in Azure. Bring the power of cloud native applications on-premises with Azure Stack HCI.
Why choose Azure Stack HCI?
- Extensible to the cloud by design
- The HCI Platform for PaaS on-premises
- The Core of Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud Strategy
- Built on Proven Enterprise Excellence
- Scalability Done Right
- Streamlined Full Stack Updates
- Superior Performance
Extensible to the cloud by design
Every Azure Stack HCI node comes enabled with Azure Arc to seamlessly bring the full power of Azure™ services to your on-premises locations.
The HCI Platform for PaaS on-premises
With Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI (AKS on HCI), get the consistency and familiarity you expect with AKS now on on-premises.
The Core of Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Microsoft is a recognized leader in the hybrid cloud space, and Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc is at its core.
Built on Proven Enterprise Excellence
Azure Stack HCI leverages key software defined technologies of Windows Server, one of the most deployed and hardened tech products in all of enterprise.
Scalability Done Right
With the support for Cluster Sets raises the scalability of Azure Stack HCI to hundreds of nodes.
Streamlined Full Stack Updates
Azure Stack HCI integrated systems feature streamlined full stack updates for simultaneous upgrade of all software and firmware.
Superior Performance
Organize your storage tiers to best fit the needs of your workloads with Azure Stack HCI.