Microsoft has announced that it has rolled out its Azure M-series virtual machines to the UK West region. This expansion follows a deployment in UK South, making it the second site in the United Kingdom to get this type of virtual machine. With the added capacity, customers can replicate their data to another site, giving them uninterrupted service when Microsoft updates a data centre's software.

Speaking about the deployment, Mark Smith, Senior Director of Azure and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft UK, said:

“Many SAP customers are adopting the cloud for their mission-critical ERP applications, and making the M-series virtual machines available in the UK West region adds extra peace of mind for customers that their data is protected and always there when they need it. These VMs offer unrivalled power and speed for in-memory applications such as SAP HANA, helping companies compete in a digital-first world.”

The M-series VMs support up to 128 virtual CPUs (vCPU) and between 1TB to 4TB of memory on a single VM. Microsoft said that seven of the different M-series VMs allow "the build-out of scale-out HANA configurations of up to 30TB". In addition, they support network bandwidth of up to 30Gpbs, making it easy to transfer large amounts of data quickly.

The software giant boasts that the M-series VMs are the only ones offered by any public cloud in the UK with 4TB of memory, thus enabling workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Server In-Memory OLTP. Many firms in the UK already use Azure M-series VMs, including the energy firm Centrica.