In August 2016, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant selected Microsoft Azure as an industry leader in Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are using cloud services provided by MS Azure 2016. Among the prominent companies using Azure for cloud computing are Oracle, SAP, Rolls-Royce, NBC News channel, BMW, and GE Healthcare, to name just a few. The main reason behind choosing Azure is its effective management of physical servers and datacenters on the cloud. Interested? Join the MS Azure Training and get acquainted.

Here’s what’s trending with Microsoft Azure for the year 2016:

Azure supports up to 32 TB for the SAP HANA database server

Microsoft has built a working partnership with SAP, providing an enterprise-proven platform for executing and managing SAP resources. Whether working in a development or a testing environment, with Microsoft Azure 2016, users can get the benefits of high scalability and reduced costs on SAP HANA workloads. In November 2016, Microsoft announced up to 32 TB storage for SAP HANA tuned Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) software programs and up to 4 TB for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) programs. Each developer and testing engineer will now have the flexibility and power to work on software applications requiring a huge volume of data in real-time scenarios.

Microsoft announces availability of Azure N-Series

With overwhelmingly positive customer feedback about the Azure Virtual Machine Series, including A, D, Dv2, F, G, and H, Microsoft Azure is now ready for the December 2016 global release of its N-Series. The Azure N-Series provides virtual machines with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) capabilities featuring the NVIDIA® platform. To meet fast-growing demands, workloads and data centers need to be equipped to handle artificial intelligence, remote and 3D visualization, advanced research, graphics rendering, and so on. Azure N-Series provides the power to drive the high-performance computing necessary for in-depth medical research, learning and training models that are GPU enabled, and so much more.

Microsoft Hybrid Use Benefit is cost-effective

Purchasing cloud computing services for major enterprises is always an expensive task. To mitigate this cost burden, Microsoft introduced the MS Azure Hybrid Use Benefit (AHUB). With the help of AHUB, customers can use their on-premises Windows server license (with software assurance) to work with MS Azure. Immaterial of the workload’s and data center’s storage space, AHUB provides support for Windows Server Virtual Machines at reduced pricing. With AHUB, users can save up to 44% of their annual expense on a single virtual machine.