Microsoft Azure has announced two new additions to its cloud computing services. First, it is now offering GS-series virtual machines (VMs) which combine its high-powered G-Series VMs with premium storage. According to Corey Sanders, partner director of program management at Microsoft Azure, the new VMs “can have up to 64TB of storage, provide 80,000 IOPS (storage I/Os per second) and deliver 2,000 [megabytes per second] of storage throughput.” Microsoft says the new VMs offer twice as much disk throughput and network bandwidth of any competing offering.
Second, Microsoft announced that Azure now supports Revolution R Enterprise (RRE), a variation of the R language, which is popular in big data applications. Microsoft recently purchased Revolution, and many industry observers had been expecting some news related to how the company planned to use R. A Microsoft blog post on the topic added, “Availability in Azure Marketplace is the first step in Microsoft?s plan to integrate Revolution?s products with Azure and, in the bigger picture, Cortana Analytics.”
