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This article is more than 1 year old

Azure Australia launches, complete with full-fibre diet

No details on bit barns, but here: listen to this cloud ambient trance instrumental

Microsoft has, as expected, pressed the Big Blue Button to enliven the Australian “geo” of its Azure cloud service.

Scott Guthrie, veep of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group had one other snippet to announce, namely the availability of dedicated fibre links – dubbed ExpressRoute - from Equinix and Telstra to the two Australian Azure bit barns. Guthrie said the fibre connections will mean “guaranteed” quality of service for those who take up Telstra or Equinix's services.

Guthrie also talked up the launch of new Azure instance types, including the G series sporting up to 32 Xeon E5 v3 cores, 450GB RAM, 6.5TB of local SSD and the chance to use 32TB of storage per virtual machine at 50k IOPS per vm with 1ms read latency.

Virtual machines of that power, Guthrie suggested, mean the cloud is now an alternative to to even bare-metal servers used to run the weightiest enterprise workloads.

But Guthrie would not offer any detail on the disposition of the Azure Australia data centres. Microsoft's Steve Martin once told The Reg that Azure Australia is co-located. Guthrie did not dispute that assertion and said Microsoft is using “a lot more than a cage” within the host data centres. He also talked up redundancy features like three optic fibre links – each to different carriers – to the data centres, but would not say of those facilities at the two facilities are unique to Microsoft or those already present in the host sites.

Microsoft Australia also announced a new service titled Sound of Azure that rummages through one's Facebook feed and uses Azure to turn it into a “sound”.

Here's what Microsoft says your correspondent's cloud sounds like:

Perhaps a glance at a Spotify profile might have produced a more accurate cloudy tune: my sound was shamefully short of distorted guitars. ®

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