COMPAREX Newsletter - February 2017

With latest-and-greatest in database technology readily available, it's time to find out if you're even ready to think about your route to migration.

COMPAREX UK are launching a SQL Server 2016 Readiness Roadmap, with services to help you optimise your existing SQL estate, in conjunction with an offering of premium advice recommending the best route to migration and licensing procurement options.

Keep your eyes peeled for our launch announcement on our social channels very soon, or get in touch to learn more.

As of 1st February 2017, Microsoft will no longer be adding new Azure customers through the Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA).

Azure will still be available to existing customers via MPSA, and to new customers through the Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Enterprise Subscription Agreement (EAS), Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE), and the Cloud Services Provider (CSP) programme.

COMPAREX UK are now a Cloud Services Provider! Please get in touch with your Account Manager to learn more.

From the beginning of 2017, System Center 2016 Client Management Suite Client Management License (Client ML) has transitioned into individual Client MLs for each of the four components, and are thus now licensed as separeate products:

• System Center 2016 Data Protection Manager Client ML (Per User and Per OSE)
• System Center 2016 Operations Manager Client ML (Per User and Per OSE)
• System Center 2016 Orchestrator Client ML (Per User and Per OSE)
• System Center 2016 Service Manager Client ML (Per User and Per OSE)

This evolution is to make it easier for customers to procure Client MLs for the specific SC CMS features they use.

To reflect the continued innovation that Microsoft is delivering in Windows 10 that improves the security, the manageability, and the Enterprise proven productivity scenarios, and to reflect the addition of a new usage benefit for VDA Per User licenses that will allow customers to host Windows 10 CBB (BYOL) on multi-tenant platforms (such as Azure & approved 3^rd Party partners), we will be increasing the Windows VDA SKU prices by about 14% effective 1^st January.

As part of this change, we are also launching a NEW VDA Per User Add-On SKU for customers who want to upgrade from VDA Per Device to VDA Per User.

Now in public preview, Azure Advisor is a 'personalised recommendation engine' that provides guidance for optimally configuring your Azure resources. Azure Advisor analyses your resource configuration and usage telemetry and recommends solutions to reduce costs and improve the security, performance, and reliability of your applications.

Visit the Azure portal today to get started. For more information, please visit the Azure Blog.

The Amazon CloudWatch Events service is now available in the Europe (London) region.

It provides a stream of events describing changes to your AWS resources, such as when an application adds tags to an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instance, or unusual API call patterns are logged by AWS CloudTrail. This enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or resource changes, with notifications from AWS services delivered in near-real-time.

Simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event, such as stopping an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, sending anAmazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) message, or adding the event to an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue. You may also schedule cron-like actions, such as taking an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume snapshot every hour, at intervals down to 1-minute. 

CloudWatch Events is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). 

NEW Veeam® Availability Suite™ 9.5 Veeam Availability Suite delivers Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ by helping organizations meet today’s service-level objectives, enabling recovery of any IT service and related applications and data within seconds and minutes.

• High-Speed Recovery – Enables low RTOs of <15 minutes and rapid recovery of the data customers want, in the form that they want it.
• Data Loss Avoidance – Avoids data loss by enabling low RPOs of <15 minutes and by facilitating off-site data protection.
• Verified Recoverability – Ensures that files, applications and virtual servers can be reliably restored when needed and ensures business resiliency through automated backup and disaster recovery (DR) testing.
• Leveraged Data – Eliminates the risks associated with application deployment, configuration changes and other testing scenarios and allows for testing changes in a production-like environment before actually deploying them.
• Complete Visibility – Provides monitoring and alerting tools so you can discover and be alerted to issues and potential problems in your IT environment before they have a significant impact on your operations.

Key differentiators:

• RTOs of <15 minutes – Veeam customers experience 96% of recoveries within their RTO SLAs, compared to just 78% for legacy solutions.
• Built for virtualization – Unlike legacy solutions retrofitted for virtualization, Veeam Availability Suite was built specifically for virtualization.
• Granular recovery – Recover individual emails, records or objects from any virtualized application or file system.
• Securely delegate file and VM restores to help desk personnel.
• Instant VM Recovery – Eliminate the need to extract the backup and copy it to production storage. Simply start the VM from the backup.
• Veeam ONE™ – Complete visibility through proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before operational impact.