The ongoing partnership between Microsoft and Intel was on full display at Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando, with product and service innovations that will propel today’s businesses. I’d like to call out three news items in my area of expertise, Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory.

Combine cloud computing with in-memory analytics and you get one of the industry’s hottest areas of growth. Microsoft Azure announced general availability of a new family of cloud instances designed especially for SAP HANA and equipped with SAP-certified 2nd gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Optane DC persistent memory. These instances are designed to tackle the biggest data challenges, with up to 9TB of memory capacity per server, thanks to the extraordinary capacity of Optane DC persistent memory.

This week also saw two of our system OEM partners, DataON and QCT, announce Intel® Select Solutions for Azure Stack HCI. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is growing rapidly and can improve performance and lower TCO compared to maintaining a separate storage network. The DataON and QCT Intel Select Solutions for Azure Stack HCI are the “Plus” configurations which include up to 512GB of Optane DC persistent memory that acts as a blazing-fast storage cache. Compared to the “Standard” DDR4-only configuration for this solution, the Plus configurations deliver up to 90% more storage IOPS thanks to the speed of Optane DC persistent memory.1 Since Select Solutions are workload-optimized and verified by Intel, IT buyers can accelerate their HCI deployment with confidence.

And finally, Microsoft’s latest SQL Server 2019 was ubiquitous at the show. Microsoft and Intel worked together to enable SQL Server 2019 and Windows Server 2019 for Optane DC persistent memory, so they are ready to take advantage of the large memory capacity and access to persistent data that is much faster than SSDs. In fact, Intel testing showed that a Xeon Scalable platform equipped with Optane DC persistent memory can support up to 36% more Microsoft SQL Server VMs than a similarly-priced server equipped only with conventional DDR4 memory.2

Ignite 2019 confirmed that 2nd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC persistent memory are ready to power your on-prem Microsoft software and Azure cloud services.

Learn more about Intel Optane DC persistent memory here, and check out the news from our big Memory and Storage Day in Seoul, South Korea last month.