Premium Storage helps more enterprises shift their Dynamics business solutions to the cloud

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to leverage the capabilities and economies of the cloud.  As part of this search, they are assessing which business processes could be moved to and transformed by the cloud. At Microsoft, we are here to help organizations in each stage of this journey to the cloud.  

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of Azure Premium Storage including Provisioned IOPS. We are very excited about these new capabilities as they help us stay true to our commitment to customers and partners to increase their deployment options and shift to the cloud.

Today’s availability of Azure Premium Storage gives Microsoft Dynamics the ability to support additional cloud based deployment choices to meet the most demanding enterprise workloads. Premium Storage is designed for Azure Virtual Machine workloads which requires consistent high I/O performance and low latency in order to host I/O intensive workloads. This dedicated I/O will provide additional support for customers running their high-performance environments of Dynamics on Azure in the public cloud as the service rolls out to the Azure datacenters globally.

Many partners and customer are already in production with Dynamics NAV and GP on Azure.  Other larger companies are deploying Dynamics AX on Azure for training, Proof-of-Concept, development and test. With the availability of Premium storage we expect the shift in these scenarios to also include production environments running on Azure.

This means customers such as Pet Supplies Plus are now positioned to go live this summer with their production deployment on Azure so they can streamline their business processes, achieve better inventory control, and as Miles Tedder, the company’s CIO and Chief Supply Chain Officer says they can position themselves as “having one of the more simplified applications portfolios in the industry and especially for companies our size.”

And Kodak Alaris can fully leverage Azure for their business application infrastructure and reduce procurement cycles and increase agility to better meet the needs of the organization. “Previously if we needed more computer power for any reason we’d have to go through a complex internal process to make the request” says John Milazzo, Kodak Alaris CIO. “The scalability and flexibility of Azure are really exciting.”

In order to further support organizations with their cloud deployments, Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services provides a set of services that helps plan and execute these deployments including best practice guidance and automation of the server set-up and software deployment. We’re committed to extend the MS Dynamics Lifecycle Services available for more of our enterprise applications, Microsoft Dynamics AX today and Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the near future.

We are also committed to taking our business solutions to the cloud for organizations of all sizes. For small and mid-sized businesses, Microsoft Dynamics GP  and Dynamics NAV  represent a compelling proposition for the increasing number of customers that want to consume their business solution in a cloud/hosted model – and for the NAV/GP Partners that want to serve them. We are working with our growing ecosystem of partners that are helping small and mid-sized businesses around the world move to the cloud by hosting Microsoft Dynamics GP and NAV on Azure.

We are looking forward to more developments and exciting announcements from the Azure team  at /Build and Ignite as they impressively rollout enhancements and updates that make Azure the premier public cloud for business.

To learn more about the Microsoft Dynamics solutions available on Azure please visit the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.