US Azure Partner Community Newsletter

در 2015-01-29 02:08، Microsoft نوشته است:

US Azure Partner Community Newsletter	January 2015
Hello Azure Partners – 2015 is off to a great start.  Did you make a personal resolution this year?  How about one for your business?  We wish you success with all your resolutions.  If your resolution was to focus more on cloud success for your business, let us help you get started with this blog post. Your Future in the Cloud: New Year, New Cloud Resolution In this month’s newsletter we’re going to look at some of the key product, program, and training messages that were announced during the last month.  Some of these include: ·         ExpressRoute Trial Offer ·         A new StorSimple Offering ·         Sales and Licensing Webcasts ·         Discounted Level 300 Training In addition to covering the Azure announcements, we are excited to share a summary of the resources from our January focus on Networking and Azure.  The sections in the newsletter below are full of information we think you will find useful as you build your Azure practice. Don’t miss: ·         Azure Community In-Focus: Networking on Azure ·         Azure Product News ·         Training and Readiness Spotlight ·         In Other News… 2015 is going to be a great year and we look forward to supporting all the great work our Partners do.   Don’t forget to join us in February when we’ll look at opportunities to work with Azure and Office 365 together.  Be sure to check out the newsletter, blogs, and community calls for some useful resources. Sincerely, Your Azure National PTS Team	Join the Azure Partners Yammer Group National PTS Team - Azure Frank Campise  Nick Johnson Jonathan Gardner
This is intended strictly for Azure Partner distribution as some information is Microsoft Confidential and is protected by the bi-lateral NDA agreement between Partner and Microsoft.
Azure Community In-Focus:Networking on Azure
This month the US Azure Partner Community has been focusing on Networking on Azure.  Networking is something that will impact every deployment you do on Azure, yet it can be overlooked as a core skill set to build as well as a way to monetize your services. What is the business opportunity for Partners when it comes to Networking on Azure?  What are the key networking points I should focus on when designing and Azure deployment?  Is there training available on Networking and Azure? What are the options for connecting Azure and an on premise network seamlessly?  We’ve addressed these questions and more in the blog series and our community call this month.  In case you missed anything the links are listed below: Microsoft Azure Partner Community: focus on Networking–Introduction Microsoft Azure Partner Community: focus on Networking – ExpressRoute January Azure Partner Community Call (recording) We also wanted to share with the community a fun and informative blog post that quickly walks through the Azure Portal and briefly describes all the available technologies. This is one worth bookmarking: The Azure Portal A to Z. If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas that you would like to see discussed in the community, please reach out to us via the Yammer group.  With over 1100 members (and growing), the Yammer community is the place to be.	Community Call Series Sign Up      February In-Focus: Office 365 with Azure
Azure Product News
Try Azure ExpressRoute Free of Charge Promotion. We are excited to announce a promotional offer for Azure ExpressRoute, making it easier to get started with fast, private network connections between your on-premises environment and Azure. Try out the Azure ExpressRoute 10 Mbps Network Service Provider (NSP) offering free of charge* from January 1, 2015 through June 30, 2015. This promotion for the ExpressRoute 10 Mbps NSP offering is available to both new and existing customers in all regions where ExpressRoute is currently offered.  For more details visit this page. StorSimple Double Down Offer Introducing the new StorSimple Double Down! offer, where our StorSimple partners have an incentive to drive quick, successful deployments of the 8000 series and earn more when they work with their customers to migrate or backup data within four (4) months of shipping the 8000 series device to their customer.  In addition to the current installation incentive of $4000, the Double Down! program provides another $4000 incentive for partners who work with their customers to tier or backup a minimum of 5TB of data. Here’s how:  If you successfully work with the customer to tier or backup 5 Terabytes (5TB) of data through a StorSimple appliance into Azure within 4 months from the date an appliance ships from the warehouse, we will double your incentive! Note: Greater than 5TB of data will need to be migrated due to StorSimple’s deduplication and compression. With these incentives, partners can now earn up to $8000 for a successful StorSimple deployment that includes the array installation and 5TB of data tiering to Azure. For Double Down! program details, contact your account team. Azure Key Vault Public Preview Secure key management is essential to protecting data in the cloud. Key Vault offers an easy, cost-effective way to safeguard keys and other secrets using Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). With Key Vault, customers can maintain control of keys used to encrypt data and create digital signatures, as well as other small secrets like passwords and streamline key management. For added assurance, customers can import or generate keys in HSMs certified to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 and Common Criteria EAL4+ standards. Customers can create keys in minutes and grant/revoke access to keys by users and applications for complete control over their data. Key Vault automatically scales to meet the meet the cryptographic needs of cloud applications and match peak demand. To learn more about the pricing, please click here.  To learn more about Key Vault or for a more technical deep dive, please read Dan’s blog here. G-Series VM Sizes General Availability Recently, we announced the General Availability release of a new series of VM sizes for Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud. This extraordinary performance will allow customers to deploy very large and demanding enterprise applications.  To learn more about how to deploy these exciting new sizes, please read Drew’s blog here. Azure Site Recovery Enabling Recovery in Azure Directly with Hyper-V Azure Site Recovery has introduced the ability to replicate and recover VMs directly to Azure without requiring System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Site Recovery provides several deployment models, including the ability to replicate VMs to—and recover them within—Azure. This includes integration with the System Center Virtual Machine Manager component for high levels of automation and convenience, while allowing you to avoid the cost and complexity of maintaining your own secondary disaster-recovery site. If you’re protecting fewer VMs or using alternative management tools, you now have the option of protecting your Hyper-V VMs in Azure without using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  For more information, please visit the Site Recovery webpage. You can read the full announcement as a part of Scott Guthrie’s blog. Premium Storage in Public Preview Premium Storage, a new SSD-based storage, is designed to support I/O-intensive workloads. With Premium Storage, you can add up to 32 TB of persistent storage per VM, with more than 50,000 IOPS per VM at less than one millisecond latency for read operations.  During preview, Premium Storage disks will be available for use with DS-Series instances (DS-Series are a special type of D-Series with identical CPU and memory configurations but can be used with Premium Storage disks).  For more information about the D-Series, please visit the Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure webpage. For more information, please visit the Preview features and Storage webpages. Azure RemoteApp GA Azure RemoteApp delivers Windows Server session-based applications from the Azure cloud to provide scale, agility, and global access to your corporate applications. With Azure RemoteApp, you can enable your users to access corporate applications from anywhere and on a variety of devices, scale up or down to meet the dynamic business needs without large capital expense or management complexity, and centralize and protect corporate applications with the security features and reliability of Azure.  For more information, please visit the Azure RemoteApp webpage.  You can read the full announcement as a part of Scott Guthrie’s blog. High-Performance VPN gateway generally available The high-performance gateway provides higher bandwidth and more connections than the current Virtual Network VPN gateway. For more details on choosing VPN gateways, please refer to the VPN gateways MSDN webpage. For more information, please visit the Virtual Network webpage.	Useful Links azure.com Scott Guthrie’s Blog Channel 9 : Azure Azure Training Kit Azure Blogs Azure on Twitter Community YouTube Playlist Azure Pricing
Upcoming Azure Community Events
US Azure Partner Community Call, Thursday Feb, 19, 9am PST. Click here to sign up.
Training and Readiness Spotlight
Discounted Level 300 Azure Training Members of the Microsoft Partner Network can now purchase digital Microsoft Official Courseware (dMOC) and Microsoft Labs Online (MLO). Using these courses, IT Pros and Developers can set their own pace to study, gain skills, and implement new technologies. There are more than 175 courses available online now, and we'll continue to add more.  For all the details, check out Scott Akin’s blog. Partner Training Hot Sheet The February 2015 US Partner Training Hot Sheet is now on the US Partner Training blog. In the Hot Sheet, you’ll find a list of upcoming in-person training, live webcasts, and partner calls, so you can plan ahead. We regularly update the Hot Sheet as new courses and calls are scheduled. You can also find training and certification news in our weekly blog post, the US Partner News Online. Sales and Licensing Excellence Webcasts As a product or license seller, it’s important for you to be current on the latest pricing updates, to anticipate real-life customer scenarios, and to know how to share about Microsoft business opportunities. Our Sales and Licensing Excellence webcasts can help you acquire this information and have more effectual customer conversations. The webcasts range from 100- to 300-level and cover a variety of Microsoft products and technologies. In our live webcasts, you’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions to our experts. You can view the current schedule and access recorded sessions anytime at http://aka.ms/lspwebcasts. We’ll also share them in the Training Recommendations Yammer group, include the listings on the Hot Sheet training schedule, and post updates on Twitter. Date Focus Webcast January 28 Licensing Azure Government Licensing (Level 200-300) January 29 Sales Sales Productivity Solution – How CRM Can Grow Your Revenue (Level 100) February 5 Sales The Evolution of Enterprise Mobility (Level 100) February 18 Sales Selling Office 365 in Healthcare (Refresher) (Level 100) February 24 Sales Dynamics ERP on Azure and How to Get Started (Level 100) To view past Azure sessions click the links below: Topic or product Focus Link to watch on demand Microsoft Azure Licensing Positioning Microsoft Azure with Your Customers – Level 100 Advanced Licensing Scenarios for Microsoft Azure – Level 200 Sales Microsoft Azure in Education – Level 100 Introduction to the Business Development Track at Azure University –Level 100 Sales and Licensing Microsoft Azure Government – Level 100-200 Microsoft Azure Government Cloud Solutions Webcast and Executive Keynote – Level 100  Take the Sales Excellence Challenge In addition to the sales and licensing updates you receive on our webcast series, preparing for and taking Sales Specialist assessments can round out your knowledge and improve your ability to talk with customers about Microsoft technologies. Partners who both attend one of the webcasts posted on this blog post (live or on-demand) and pass an eligible Sales Specialist assessment between February 1 and April 30 will be entered* into a drawing for one of three Surface Pro 3 tablets. For a list of assessments, see our blog post about the Sales Excellence Challenge. *No purchase necessary. Open only to legal residents of the 50 U.S. + DC 18+ with an active MPN ID. Game ends 4/30/15. Official rules. Azure IaaS for IT Pros Join Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, Azure, as he kicks off a week of Azure training for IT Professionals.  Over the course of four days, Senior Technical Evangelist Rick Claus and members of Azure Engineering deep dive into the technologies critical for IT Pro Implementers, like you, to help better understand and build your foundational cloud skills.  Experts will share their deep technical insights on these topics which will also prepare you to take Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions for Microsoft Azure Specialist Certification.  Click to access the virtual training course.  On-demand:  PHP for Azure Looking for a tried &; true scripting language?  Check out PHP, and extend your coding toolbox. Walk through the basics of this popular server side scripting language, with experts Stacey Mulcahy and Jamie Kosoy.  In this on-demand course, see how to set up your deployment environment, write a basic blogging app, and get up and running on Azure. Watch here!  Maximizing Your Azure Credits Seven minutes could save you some money every month.  Click out this video to see how. Migrating VMs from Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure If you'd like to learn more about migrating virtual machines (VMs) from Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, check out this course. Explore reasons for the migration, plus how to prepare for it. Get the details on exporting and converting VMs from Amazon AWS, how to upload and import them to Microsoft Azure, and more!
In Other News…
Microsoft Azure Government Are you looking for solutions for Government: Cloud, Mobility, Business Insights / Mission Critical, Social / Productivity?  Be sure to view the Microsoft Government, Microsoft Azure Government and Fed.TV pages. Assessment and Planning Experience The Assessment and Planning Experience (APEx) is a sales program that provides helpful guides, tools, and support to assist customers with scanning their software environments, building a detailed view of their IT estate, and understanding the results of software environment scans and IT estate.  Use APEx to have great upfront conversations with customers, efficiently collect inventory data, and provide new insights that will help customers make informed decisions around their current technology resources and future investments.  Visit this site to learn more. Partner Investment Engine is Available PIE is a newly launched, scalable, partner facing platform. This is a huge opportunity for partners to make funds outside of the global incentives they’re earning. It is a single point of entry to access investment programs. Partners receive real-time status updates on requested engagements and have access to a personalized dashboard for holistic viewing of all investment programs. The execution is straightforward, the tool is simple to use and allows partners to drive MS priorities. Improved Access: Provides you better access to other Microsoft resources that can help improve business strategies and decisions. Who and How can you access PIE? All managed and unmanaged partners in the US have access to PIE for varying investment programs. Simply log-in with your US MPN Microsoft Account at https://www.microsoftpartnerinvestments.com/AccountManagement and request your personalized access code. Need More Details? ·         Join our monthly PIE Office Hours. ·         Check out our External Yammer Site! ·         Review Program Resources on PIE ·         Email PIE Support at piesupp@microsoft.com for any additional questions Microsoft Ignite Conference The best and brightest minds will be all in one place to talk cloud infrastructure and management, productivity, big data and the internet of things, unified communications, mobility and more. So welcome, thinkers. And get ready for a glimpse at what’s possible today and in the future. WPC 2015 Register early for the most savings.  Don’t miss out on the power of partnership: make the investment to grow your network and drive future business by registering today!
The Fine Print
This is intended strictly for Azure Partner distribution as some information is Microsoft Confidential and is protected by the bi-lateral NDA agreement between Partner and Microsoft. SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETTER: Please feel free to forward this Newsletter to your colleagues.  Click Here to register and receive the next issue. This newsletter is delivered to you as a benefit of your organization’s membership in the Microsoft Partner Network. To set your contact preferences for other Microsoft communications click here. This newsletter was sent by: Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 USA