Microsoft’s unleashing what it believes is the UK’s “most powerful cloud services” – the M-Series virtual machines in Azure.
With the ability to support up to 128 virtual central processing units (vCPU) and between one and 3.8 tebibytes of RAM, which is equal to 1,024 gigabytes, on a single VM, the M-Series should be able to handle most workloads.
The Redmond company has been keen to play up that the latest offering, which provides up to 20 terabytes of memory, is the most powerful of its type in the UK, even going so far as to promote the VMs as the only one capable of handling certain large workloads – such as those on SAP HANA. 
The reason for this, ‘mine is bigger than yours’ is obviously to lure companies away from competitors AWS, and IBM, whilst keeping a large gap between itself and Google.
SAP’s mention comes thanks to the German company’s expanded partnership with Microsoft, that was announced in December. The partnership is aimed at helping business to move to the cloud and “digitally transform their business.”
“By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, we are able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings that we are passing on to our customers,” said Jon Beck, Principle Program Manager at Microsoft.
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The company has also announced Dv3 VMs in UK data centres, which are said to be built using new technology that allows for greater performance and efficiency, something that Microsoft says creates savings that it can then pass on to its customers who, “store data and run apps in the cloud for their businesses.”
The Dv3 VMs will cost up to 28% less than the previous VMs called Dv2.
The “new technology” in the Dv3 VMs is called hyper-threading, which operates on Intel processors, and allows users to run several process at once.
Dv3s offer up to 64 vCPUs and 256 gigabytes of RAM. Ev3s offer 432GB of RAM.
