As the need for streamlined data processing becomes increasingly crucial for businesses, innovations in artificial intelligence are emerging to bear the brunt of mass analysis and organization.

To support legacy enterprise customers through the overhaul required to participate in these modern and more efficient processes, Microsoft Corp. has upgraded its Azure cloud compute platform this week to include a physical network appliance, Azure Data Box, that further enables automation at every level.

Jeffrey Snover (pictured), technical fellow and chief architect for Azure storage and cloud edge at Microsoft, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Microsoft’s new Data Box release and how the company is continuing to optimize Azure for a changing customer base. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

There’s a lot of news today. Give us a little bit of context into things your teams have been working on.

Snover: The initial mission is complete, to provide general purpose scripting for Windows — but now we have a new mission, to manage anything anywhere. We’ve taken PowerShell and open-sourced it; we ported it to macOS and Linux. Now you can manage from anywhere — your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser. Manage anything anywhere — Azure, AWS or Google, any hypervisor, Hyper-V, VMware, or any physical server.

The reason why we couldn’t use Azure directly is Azure’s design center is for very large systems. We took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it, and now our systems can start with two servers. We take Azure, put it on top a Windows server, package it as an appliance experience, and call that Azure Stack.

Give us the update on Azure Stack.

Snover: There’s a couple of scenarios for Data Box Edge. First, you’ve got a bunch of data in your enterprise and you’d like it to be in Azure. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, send it back to us, and it shows up in Azure. [If you] need more, we send you a box that’s about a hundred terabytes of data; it is specially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up. That’s Data Box [Gateway].

Then there’s Data Box Edge. We send you a server, you plug that in, connect it to your Azure storage, and then all your storage is available through here. Anything you write here is available immediately. You can run [internet-of-things] edge platforms, gateways, Kubernetes clusters, [and] we’re integrating in brainwave technology. Microsoft designed a chip specially for AI, we call it a brainwave chip, and that’s available in the Data Box Edge. So now when you do AI, the processing can be very fast.

We want to simplify the environment; that’s been the problem we’ve had in IT for a long time. I worry a multicloud world has gotten us into more silos. How do you simplify this over time for customers?

Snover: The gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we’ve done in the past. It’s an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people want to build it. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and start using it. You don’t do the provisioning, we do all that for you. Within a day it’s up and running and your users are using it.

I’m always taking a look at a very complex situation and saying, “What’s the heart of it?” What are the essential things here. I’m always looking for the simple story and then applying it.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored coverage of Microsoft Ignite, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE