<v ->Welcome to the Data Center Innovation session.</v> I am Andy Vargas, vice president and general manager of the Microsoft Technology Center at Intel. For those of you who do not know, MTC is a group of software technical experts at Intel that collaborate with Microsoft to define, develop, and deliver new technologies and experiences across IoT, client, and data center. We have an engineering partnership that goes back over 25 years. Today, we will go over what's new in the data center from Intel and Microsoft. In this session, Joe Sherman, principal group program manager, will be joining me to highlight some of the co-engineering investments we have been closely working on. Earlier in the keynote, I noted the public preview of DCsv3 is now available. At Microsoft Ignite, it was announced that the Dv5, Ev5 for general purpose VMs, built on Intel's 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors are now GA. We're really excited with the performance potential of these new VMs. These new VMs will deliver up to 15% increased performance and better price to performance gen over gen. <v ->That's right, Andy.</v> Microsoft continues to collaborate with our technology partners like Intel to embed the latest innovations in Azure IaaS. Customers have come to expect continued price performance improvements from the cloud, and we intend to continuously improve our capabilities. The new Dv5 Virtual Machines target many general purpose workloads, like eCommerce systems, web frontends, and desktop virtualization solutions. The Ev5 Virtual Machines are specifically engineered to tackle memory intensive workloads like in-memory business analytics and other business critical applications. We have increased the memory and virtual CPU counts for greater performance and scalability. Not all workloads are the same. Therefore adjusting VCPUs to memory ratios, among other factors, can make a difference in the overall performance of the application. We see that, in fact, in various scenarios. Take, for example, the data-intensive workloads. Storage throughput becomes especially important when our customers deploy mission-critical OLTP applications that require a large number of disk storage operations. For these customer scenarios, we have announced at Ignite the preview of the Ebv5 Azure Virtual Machines. A new memory optimized VM series that delivers up to 300% increased remote storage performance, these new VMs offer up to 120,000 operations per second and 4,000 megabytes per second of remote disk storage throughput and, of course, feature the latest Intel processors. The increased storage throughput is ideal for large relational databases. Customers can also consolidate existing workloads on fewer VMs or on smaller VM sizes, and that can save costs. <v ->On a related note,</v> Principal Technologies performed a series of benchmarks that show some of the performance benefits of the new VMs. It showed that the new VMs processed the SQL Server workload significantly faster than the older VMs. It can be up to 1.27x as fast for businesses utilizing mid-size VMs. This benefit can enable you to find data insights in less time and start using them to improve your business sooner. Another example includes Intel Software Guard Extensions in the new DCsv3 VMs. You can see an increase of 1500x in EPC Memory and 12x in Regular Memory count. These trusted execution environments make it easier for customers to run enterprise workloads and ensure their sensitive workloads are confidential. Moving to another topic, Joe, we have partnered a lot through numerous projects together. One that I would like to bring up with you is the investments on LAMP stack. Can you tell us a bit more of what we're driving together? Absolutely, we wanted to demonstrate how Azure customers can benefit from the latest Dv5, Ev5 Virtual Machines when running their applications on Azure. To do that, as an example, we deployed a WordPress image on Azure managed solution. This solution hosts a scalable WordPress content management system server and includes Azure components, such as our Virtual Machine Scale Sets running on the Intel Ice Lake-based Virtual Machines I previously talked about and the Azure File Share. For our testing, we compared the performance of WordPress running on Azure VMs, specifically the Ddsv5 versus the Ddsv4 VM sizes, each with four virtual CPUs. And we stress-tested our WordPress website to replicate traditional user behavior. These workload categories need to execute a high volume of HTTPS requests, which in turn require encryption and decryption of web traffic. Given the characteristics of the workload, we monitored performance across two key metrics, average response time and throughput. Also thanks to the built-in crypto acceleration provided by the Intel Ice Lake processors, the Dv5 series VMs delivered a throughput performance increase of 58% and a reduced average wait time of 55% compared to the prior generation of Intel-based VMs. This is a very positive indication that the new Dv5, Ev5 series VMs can offer significant performance improvements for your workloads. <v ->This is great.</v> These benchmarks are achieved through VM images that Intel created in partnership with Bitnami. The two VM images, one for NginX and one for WordPress, make it easier for customers to leverage the Ice Lake cryptographic acceleration benefits into their LAMP stack server applications. They are also affinitized to Ice Lake Dv5 VMs and are available in the Azure Marketplace today for you to try out. I saw that there was a new tool available that Microsoft announced at Ignite. Can you talk a bit more about that? <v ->Yes, as you can see,</v> the range of options of available to customers to run their workloads on Azure keeps growing. We recognize that a broadening portfolio may be more difficult to navigate. So we've introduced the Virtual Machines Selector, which is a web-based tool to help customers simplify and accelerate their VM selection process. The Virtual Machine Selector ultimately identifies the best Virtual Machine and disk storage based on the requirements the customer enters. You will then be able to view the prices and add the selected VMs to the pricing calculator as the next step. Let's see it in action. It's an easy way to find what you're looking for. For example, you can find the Virtual Machine based on the workload type. You can drill into details of the individual workloads, and then you can select the specs of the Virtual Machine to match what you think you need. If I click next, then I can start to look at other options for my Virtual Machine. I can select the disk storage needs. Then if I click next again, I can select the operating system and image I need. I can select the region where I want the Virtual Machines to be. Finally, the selector tool will provide me recommended Virtual Machines and then give me a link to the pricing tool where I can see what my recommended configuration is. <v ->That's amazing.</v> The tools solve some of the challenges that we have heard from customers on figuring out the right VMs based on their needs and budget. Well, this wraps up our session today. Thank you, Joe, it's been a pleasure to have you be part of this session with me. To learn more about the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and the Azure VM Selector Tool, check out these links.
