REDMOND – Microsoft Corp. announced the release of several new Azure products Tuesday morning, including the Azure Data Box Edge, Azure Stack HCI Solutions, the Anomaly Detector, and Azure Custom Vision.
Azure Data Box Edge
While this product was introduced at last year’s Microsoft Ignite event in beta, it will now be generally available.
The Azure Data Box Edge is a cloud-managed computing platform designed for edge computing and network data transfer capabilities.
This will allow for data processing at the edge and acceleration of the workload of Machine Learning through a Field Programmable Gate Array which is powered by Azure Machine Learning and Intel Arria 10, as well as the ability to transfer data over the internet in real-time to Azure for deep analytics, model retraining at cloud scale, and long-term storage.
Azure Stack HCI Solutions
In an effort to facilitate its customers to upgrade their data centers through virtualized applications on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) – which can lead to lower costs and boosted performance – Microsoft has introduced its HCI technology into the Azure Stack in its Azure Stack HCI Solutions.
While it will still be equipped with much of the same features as Azure Stack – such as the software-defined compute, storage, and networking technology – it will also feature simplified cloud access through the Azure hybrid services in Windows Admin Center.
Azure Stack HCI solutions feature the same software-defined compute, storage, and networking technology as Azure Stack, and include simplified cloud access via the Azure hybrid services in Windows Admin Center.
Anomaly Detector
This new service being offered through Azure Cognitive Services will allow developers to embed anomaly detection directly into their applications; which will then identify and correct any anomalies detected within the apps data.
What Microsoft says the detection of these anomalies will provide is the ability to quickly become aware of any serious issues, such as identifying business incidents and text errors, monitoring IoT device traffic, detecting fraud, responding to changing markets, and more, thus limiting loss and the impact on customers.
Azure Custom Vision
A cognitive service that can be applied to AI, Azure Custom Vision will allow you to build, deploy, or improve existing image classifiers.
Image classifiers are an AI service that will apply labels to images as it detects characteristics within the image.
By using the Azure Custom Vision, developers can ensure that their image classifiers will know which characteristics are the priority to the business, and can export these customized indicators and have them run offline in real-time on iOS (in CoreML), Android, (in TensorFlow), and a variety of other devices on the edge.
Developers can train their own classifier to recognize what matters most in their scenarios, or export these custom classifiers and run them offline, and in real time, on iOS (in CoreML), Android (in TensorFlow) and many other devices on the edge. The exported models are optimized for the constraints of a mobile device providing incredible throughput while still maintaining high accuracy.
