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Intel and Azure

Explore secure, flexible, and high-performing joint solutions from Microsoft and Intel.

Find the right Intel-based Azure VMs for your needs and budget with the virtual machine selector

Microsoft and Intel build on long-standing co-engineering efforts to enable differentiated services within Azure. By combining innovative software and services with cutting-edge hardware, the Intel and Microsoft partnership delivers state-of-the-art-edge to cloud solutions for Industrial IoT and computer vision edge AI, SAP on Azure, high-performance computing (HPC), confidential computing, hybrid cloud, Microsoft SQL Server, AI, analytics, and more.

Learn more about intelligent edge to cloud solutions with Intel powered edge devices and cloud software and solutions for Azure.

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Hybrid by design

Develop and deploy where you want. Extend Azure on-premises by using Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack HCI with Intel Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel solid state drives (SSDs). And, use Azure Stack Edge with Intel Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and Intel SSDs for fast and local inferencing.

Intel-based Azure Virtual Machines

Whether you're looking for support for an enterprise SAP environment or mission-critical performance for Windows Server and SQL Server, you’ll find support for a broad range of Intel-based Azure workloads. For compute-intensive needs such as AI, machine learning, and other HPC workloads, browse a wide portfolio of Intel Xeon®-based Azure VMs—including those featuring 3rd Generation Intel Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processors.

organization-wide support plan
Target workloads Azure VM instance type Intel Processor(s)

Dev/test, low-traffic web servers, code repositories, and others

Entry-level A-series

Applications not requiring the full performance of the CPU continuously

Burstable B-series

E-commerce systems, desktop virtualization, CRM, application servers, and others

General purpose D-series

Blockchain secure enclaves

Confidential computing DC-series

Memory-intensive enterprise apps, SAP HANA workloads, large relational databases

Memory-optimized E- and M-series

Compute-intensive workloads, EDA, network appliances, batch processes, and others

Compute-optimized F-series

High-performance computing

Big Compute H series

Xeon® E5-2667 v3

Workloads

SAP on Azure

SAP on Azure offers a high-performance, scalable infrastructure for SAP HANA—with VMs that offer up to 12 TB of RAM per VM and purpose-built, bare-metal instances with up to 24 TB of RAM, powered by Intel Xeon® processors. Spin up highly scalable SAP HANA-certified systems on Azure in minutes, across the trusted Azure global infrastructure of 60+ regions.

Additional resources:

Find SAP HANA VMs available by Azure region

Learn strategies for migrating SAP systems to Azure

Read documentation on SAP HANA database backup in Azure VMs

HPC workloads on Azure

Improve performance, MPI scalability, and cost efficiency for HPC workloads on Azure. Azure HC-series VMs, powered by Intel Xeon® Scalable processors and AVX-tuned applications, enable high-performance computing that’s optimized for large-scale, computationally intensive applications.

Additional resources:

Read HPC documentation for Azure HC-series VMs

Read the article on cutting-edge HPC technology with Azure HC-series VMs

Learn more about field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and how to deploy machine learning models to FPGAs using Azure Machine Learning

Azure confidential computing

Confidential computing on Azure enables new scenarios, such as multiparty machine learning, helps strengthen security for blockchain, and enhances always-encrypted technology. Building on Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), it delivers added protections for data while it’s being processed in the cloud. Intel SGX is a tool that enables developers to better protect their most sensitive data and application code in-memory within an encrypted enclave that’s even protected from the cloud provider and low-level system processes.

Additional resources:

Learn more about Azure confidential computing

Read documentation for solutions on Azure for Intel SGX

Get an overview of confidential computing

AI on Azure

Accelerate the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle with an enterprise-grade service for simplifying the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models. Build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and cost-effectively with Azure Machine Learning and powerful Intel CPU and FPGA compute resources. Create and accelerate model inferencing across Intel hardware using Azure Machine Learning and ONNX Runtime, an open-source project founded by Microsoft and supported by Intel.

Additional resources:

Build business-critical machine learning models at scale with Azure Machine Learning

Learn more about machine learning optimization with ONNX Runtime

Bring the latest innovation to your solutions

Get more speed, reliability, and intelligent capabilities to get your solutions to market faster with joint-engineering architecture and cloud services from the Azure and Intel partnership. Plus, find flexibility in sizing, performance, and cost across any workload—Intel Xeon® processors are available across all Azure Virtual Machines.

Explore Intel's data-centric portfolio with:

Intel Xeon® processors for Azure compute and storage

Intel OptaneTM DC persistent memory

Intel field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)

Intel ethernet products

Intel solid state drives (SSDs)

Intel silicon photonics 100G PSM4

Intel open-source machine learning frameworks and libraries

Intel Clear Linux Project

Modernize Your Business-Critical Systems and Applications with the Cloud

Modernize your mission-critical workloads

Foster innovation within your organization, keep your customers happy, and stay ahead of the competition. Learn how to begin migrating your most important systems and apps to the cloud with proven recommendations and best practices—direct from Microsoft and Intel.

Intel in Azure Marketplace

Take a look at other partner technologies that run on Intel.

  • BigDL makes it easier to develop deep learning applications as standard Spark programs, using Scala or Python and then to run those applications on existing Spark or Hadoop clusters without expensive, specialized hardware. Apache Spark enables applications to seamlessly scale across Intel Xeon® processor–based nodes on a massive scale, and it delivers extraordinary performance across the Xeon® processor–based infrastructure.

  • Analytics Zoo is an open-source project that seamlessly unites Spark, TensorFlow, Keras, and BigDL programs into an integrated pipeline. The pipeline can transparently scale out to a large Hadoop/Spark cluster for distributed training or inference.

  • This release enables developers to quickly prototype by reducing complexity associated with integrating multiple software components. The stack includes highly tuned software components across the operating system (Clear Linux OS), a deep learning framework (TensorFlow and others), deep learning libraries (Intel Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks), and other software components.

  • An extension of the Ubuntu version of Microsoft data science VMs, this data science VM comes with Python environments optimized for deep learning on Intel Xeon® Processors. These environments include open-source deep learning frameworks with an Intel MKL-DNN backend for optimal performance on Xeon® Processors. These environments require no changes to existing code and accelerate deep learning training and inference.

Partners: Grow your cloud business

Gain a deeper understanding of customer cloud needs, identify opportunities to be more profitable with cloud solutions, and get marketing and technical support to grow your success. The Cloud Solution Provider program gives you the building blocks—including technical enablement, demand generation funds, and go-to-market incentives—to expand your cloud business.

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