Bill Karagounis General Manager, Azure Global Industry Sovereign Solutions, published a post to announce the Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) for customers who need cloud computing capabilities in hybrid or challenging environments, including remote areas.
Connectivity and satellite communications option
“This announcement is complemented by our Azure Space offerings and partnerships that can extend satellite connectivity anywhere in the world. Scenarios range from mobile command centers, humanitarian assistance, military mission needs, mineral exploration, and other use cases requiring high intensity, secure computing on Azure,” Karagounis wrote in the post.
The MDC is designed for meeting computing and storage needs in areas with adverse conditions. With the MDC, customers can migrate their apps to Azure while still running these workloads on-premises with low-latency connections to their own datacenter. This provides a steppingstone for transforming workloads to the Azure API with the option of continuing to run these apps on-premises, or in public or sovereign clouds.
MDC comes with a full network connectivity option, occasionally connected or fully disconnected option. Additionally, Microsoft is partnering with satellite operators to provide an option for secure and reliable connectivity to field-deployed MDC units. MDC can use satellite communications as the primary connection where no other network is available.