CloudMBI™ utilizes Windows Azure as the Cloud platform for deployment.
Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables a media business to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.
Windows Azure delivers a 99.95% monthly SLA and enables a customer to build and run highly available applications without focusing on the infrastructure. It provides automatic OS and service patching, built in network load balancing and resiliency to hardware failure. It supports a deployment model that enables a business to easily upgrade applications without downtime.
Focus on rapidly implementing applications in the cloud
- Windows Azure allows CloudMBI™ to be continuously available, even during system upgrades and hardware failures.
- Network load balancing and failover are handled automatically, reducing the effort and cost of administering the application environment resulting lower IT costs.
- Windows Azure handles automatically patching the OS that CloudMBI™ runs on top of, removing the need for IT to manually coordinate or script this.
- Compute capabilities in Windows Azure allow scaling of BI applications up or down when necessary, so they use only the resources they need.
Since CloudMBI™ is built over SQL, it is fundamental that this is supported in Azure and it is. SQL Azure is a highly available and scalable cloud database service built on SQL Server technologies. With SQL Azure, developers and IT departments do not have to install, setup or manage any database. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required. SQL Azure provides a full featured relational database and enables many different types of applications. Most importantly it supports Business Intelligence.
SQL Azure empowers media business users through the familiar tools they already know how to use today, such as Microsoft Excel. End users can create their own reports and analysis and easily share and collaborate with their colleagues. Developers can rely on feature-rich, powerful, and easy-to-use online analytical processing (OLAP) and data-mining capabilities. SQL Azure is also designed with IT manageability and cost effectiveness in mind, allowing for better management of critical data assets across diverse systems to ensure the integrity of information, spanning the desktop, datacenter, and cloud.
