Windows Azure

Cloud technologies have emerged as one of the key elements to consider when deploying IT infrastructure for SMBs and Enterprise at large. Today with companies offering three major services, (IaaS, PaaS & SaaS ) as part of Private, Public & Hybrid models, Organizations have a choice to choose between these along with managed and unmanaged models with acceptable SLAs.

Cloud technologies can be adopted for various computing and storage requirements that range from Testing & Staging to Production infrastructures. Windows azure is one such platform provided by Microsoft to run cloud applications and services. Azure provides PaaS and IaaS services that can be considered while implementing application services like Web, ERP, Extranet applications etc. Agni Information System’s being a managed services provider, worked with Microsoft’s Azure team to deploy cloud services for one of their clients. The requirement from the client was to design and deploy Active Directory services, Application servers and NAS services using Azure platform. This deployment was to ensure high availability of Directory services and File services of the on premise servers with periodic synchronization of data between Azure Data center and on premise Server farm infrastructure. Solution Architects from Agni along with Microsoft’s consultants analyzed the computing requirement of the existing AD, Application servers & File servers to plan computing and storage capacity for Azure deployment. The reports of the analysis were used to plan capacity for existing utilization and future growth.

With all the relevant data and pre-requisites, utilizing PaaS model from Azure, Windows 2012 active directory services was deployed and synchronized with the on premise servers. The same option was used to deploy file services using the available templates on Azure. The design and deployment of these services ensured maximum uptime in case of server failure in Azure. The synchronization between on premise and Azure datacenter required a permanent VPN connectivity which was configured by Agni’s team. Advanced encryption protocols were used to ensure Confidentiality, Integrity and authenticity of the data that were synchronized between the client server farm infrastructure and Azure data centers.

MS Azure was chosen as it delivered scalable & Flexible solution, Security, Fault tolerance, & cost benefit coupled with the SLA’s that formed a complete package. The deployed infrastructure is managed using Azure’s management dashboard. The dashboard provides an insight to the provisioned infrastructure in terms of performance and availability. Scaling the hardware resource or deploying a service is just a click away.

For further assistance, contact us at info@agniinfo.com