Stone Elysium achieves Microsoft certification

Stone Group, a leading provider of ICT solutions to UK public and private sectors, has today announced that it is the only Microsoft partner who caters exclusively to the UK, to have a hyper converged solution certified by Microsoft and featured in the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI catalogue. Stone’s HCI solution, Stone Elysium, provides a high level of reliable performance and scalability, backed by a dedicated UK support team, at a lower price point than some of the top tier global vendors.
Featuring Microsoft’s Storage Spaces Direct platform and powered by the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, Stone Elysium is a high performance, bespoke hyper converged cluster platform. It can be scaled from four to 16 nodes in a single solution. The solution utilises brand new Microsoft Windows Server 2019 features, including CSV level deduplication, Windows Admin Centre, and Cloud Witness.
To meet the certification requirements, Stone Elysium underwent exhaustive stress testing to ensure the solution design and hardware quality matched Microsoft’s specification.
Simon Harbridge, CEO at Stone Group, commented, “We’ve worked extremely hard to achieve Microsoft certification for Stone Elysium, and we are proud to become the first UK exclusive partner to have solutions featured in the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI catalogue.
“Stone Elysium is the ultimate hyper converged solution for high performance, incredibly resilient, and easy-to-manage infrastructure. Our hybrid accelerations series products come with a bespoke support service and a seven-year warranty, allowing our customers peace of mind and ensuring they can concentrate on front line service delivery, while we take care of the back end.”

Benefits of upgrading to a Stone HAS solution on the 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor platform:

Accelerate AI and Analytics Insights

Experience new levels of compute performance with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—with more world-class per-core performance and new features, such as Intel® DL Boost which accelerates AI inference 30x on an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 9200 processor compared to an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 processor. But compute performance only takes you so far. Intel has worked with its vast ecosystem to optimize performance across leading software. A 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor paired with revolutionary Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory doubles memory capacity when combined with DRAM (vs. a DRAM-only approach). And, Intel® Optane™ SSDs deliver exceptional storage performance, while Intel networking innovations provide fast I/O between platforms.

One Infrastructure – Many Demanding Workloads

2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor-based servers excel at running your most compute-intensive and data demanding workloads—from AI training and inference, to real-time, in-memory analytics, to HPC workloads, to all of your business-critical and everyday workloads. And that means you can spend your time driving growth, differentiation and innovation instead of managing multiple infrastructures.

Hardware-hardened Security

Deploying strong security software is critical, but a software-only security approach can only take you so far. That’s why Intel designed 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with built-in security features. Silicon-based innovations help to eliminate threats from data center platforms, and additional features greatly accelerate data encryption and decryption for data at rest, in use and in flight.

Next-level Hybrid Cloud

Run 3.5x more VMs per server versus prior generation2 (5-year refresh VM density improvement). Take advantage of hardware-based virtualization enhancements. Improve cloud-based resource utilization. And scale server performance and capacity to new highs.
These are just a few of the reasons your hybrid cloud will benefit from 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor-based servers, delivering new levels of agility, cost-efficiency, scalability and responsiveness.
For more information on Stone Elysium, click here.