Enterprises running large scale AI, Analytic, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments need more than just infrastructure. They need to dynamically match thousands of jobs with available capacity while balancing performance, resilience, availability, and cost.
Today, Microsoft Azure and IBM are announcing the IBM® Spectrum Symphony Provider Plugin for Microsoft Azure Compute Fleet. This collaborative integration enables IBM Spectrum Symphony and
Azure Compute Fleet to dynamically access and manage Azure compute capacity, providing an optimized execution environment as well as allowing enterprises to extend and elastically burst established Symphony environments to Azure.
IBM Symphony is a proven workload orchestration platform used across financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, energy, and other compute-intensive industries.
“Symphony’s native enablement on Azure gives our joint customers a best-in-class platform for orchestrating HPC workloads with the performance, resilience, and cost efficiency they require,” said Sripriya Srinivasan, General Manager, IBM Software Products, IBM. “This is a transformational step forward for hybrid computing.”
Partnership highlights
The Microsoft and IBM collaboration brings together Symphony’s enterprise workload orchestration capabilities with the scale and flexibility of Azure Compute Fleet:
- Dynamically provision and scale as Symphony workload demand increases or decreases, so that you never use more resources that you need.
- Ensure workload performance through Policy-driven elasticity governed by existing workload priorities and service-level objectives,
- Take advantage of Azure Virtual Machines’ wide array of SKU choices by flexibly deploying based on workload requirements and available capacity.
- Seamlessly leverage Spot instances, so that workloads can run at optimal cost.
- Support hybrid workload orchestration that extends established Symphony environments to Azure so that they can realize the cost and availability benefits of hybrid multi-cloud deployment.
Connecting Symphony workload demand with Azure capacity
At the center of the integration is an Azure resource connector for IBM Host Factory. The connector translates Symphony resource requirements into Azure Compute Fleet requests, creating a direct bridge between the Symphony orchestration layer and Azure infrastructure.
The architecture maintains a clear separation of responsibilities: Symphony manages the workload while Azure Compute Fleet manages access to compute capacity.
Figure 1: IBM Spectrum Symphony manages workload orchestration, while Azure Compute Fleet provides access to
eligible Spot and pay-as-you-go VM capacity.
When workload demand increases, Symphony determines the additional resources required through Host Factory. The Azure resource connector translates those requirements into a Compute Fleet request, and Azure provisions eligible infrastructure.
The resulting Azure virtual machines join the Symphony environment as execution hosts and begin processing jobs. As workload demand decreases, the resources can be returned.
Symphony on Azure enables customers to:
- Access a broader pool of Azure capacity by provisioning across multiple eligible VM families instead of relying on a single VM SKU.
- Select infrastructure using workload attributes such as vCPU, memory, storage, and other requirements.
- Balance availability and cost through a flexible combination of Azure Spot Virtual Machines and pay-as-you-go VMs.
- Increase workload throughput and infrastructure utilization by matching queued jobs with suitable Azure capacity.
- Expand compute capacity during periods of peak demand without permanently provisioning infrastructure for peak usage.
These capabilities are particularly valuable for financial risk calculations, scientific computing, engineering analysis, and other large-scale batch workloads.
Different jobs can require different combinations of CPU, memory, performance, availability, and price. Azure Compute Fleet can provision across eligible VM types and purchasing models, expanding the pool of infrastructure available to execute those workloads for faster, more cost-efficient deployments.
Bringing established enterprise compute environments to Azure
Many enterprises have invested years developing sophisticated Symphony environments with application-specific scheduling policies, priorities, queues, service-level objectives, and operational processes. Microsoft and IBM are working with joint enterprise customers across financial services and other compute-intensive industries to expand adoption and advance the integration.
Together, Microsoft and IBM are combining IBM Symphony workload orchestration with the scale, flexibility, and infrastructure choice of Microsoft Azure helping enterprises run demanding compute workloads with greater confidence and efficiency.
To learn more about how to burst IBM Spectrum Symphony into Microsoft Azure with the new Azure Compute Fleet cloud provider visit IBM Technical Blog here
To download the Azure Compute Fleet plugin for IBM® Spectrum Symphony, visit the Azure Marketplace.