In July 2015, Power BI was launched into the realm of technology with a great response in the marketplace. As Microsoft states, Power BI’s services approach, “seconds to sign up, minutes to wow,” helped launch Power BI into thousands of organizations globally. Like all technology, the needs and wants of it’s consumers outweighed Power BI’s original performance level making Microsoft address the new challenges with an improved solution.
Introducing, Power BI Premium. Power BI Premium is designed to address the challenges that many users were facing in large enterprise deployments. To optimize their scenarios, Power BI Premium gives the ability to serve a large number of users who simply need to view and explore dashboards without breaking the bank. How? Let us explain.
Unlike Power BI, Power BI Premium has a set of resources that are reserved for the exclusive use by you, and only you. Power BI premium calls this “dedicated capacity.” In Power BI, you had shared capacity which restricted a number of refreshes per day and only allowed 1GB model size to ensure that specific users didn’t monopolize this shared capacity. All these limitations are now removed with power BI premium allowing for a much large scale, better performance, and fresher data. Better yet, you can publish your content and share to as many users in your organization or beyond without ever having to purchase a license for them.
We know with a change like this comes worrisome, hesitancy, and of course, disbelief. Here are some interesting facts that may make your above feelings, disappear.
- Worried about having to retrain, reprogram, etc.? Don’t be. For your end users, everything works exactly as before.
- Worried about security? We all know that going full-cloud may not be the best to your unique organization. Power BI Premium has also included an on-premises server called the Power BI Report Server. It allows you to keep sensitive information fully behind your firewall and out of the cloud. This Report Server mixes cloud and on-premises into a hybrid solution.
- Due to dedicated capacity, when you purchase Power BI Premium, you want to make sure that you provision enough capacity to support your workload. To do this, you purchase virtual cores (V-cores.) Click here for the Capacity Calculator. (Please note that this is not an exact as estimating capacity is not an exact science.)
- V-Cores are composed of frontend and backend cores.
- Frontend cores are generally everything related to the user experience. Ex: Dashboards, Reports, scheduling, APIs, access rights, etc.
- Backend cores are just as they sound, the backend of how things are functioning. Ex: query processing, data refresh, cache management, etc.
- Power BI Premium for P1, P2, and P3 will be available for purchase on June 14, 2017.
- Have an extremely large deployment? Maybe the scale capacity just doesn’t give you enough? Microsoft has prepared a “scale-out” capacity. These just means you can purchase multiple capacity nodes and deploy them together through one cluster.
Power BI Premium is still a work in progress. There will be lots of new capacity features that will soon be launched in their roadmap such as pinning datasets to memory or read-only replicas. For now, though, Power BI Premium has the following three capacity features:
- Noisy neighbors isolation: The query performance of your reports and dashboards is now protected from other users in your Power BI Service.
- Huge dataset storage and no user quotas: Previously you were allowed up to 10GB per Power BI Pro license, now you get 100 TB storage for each capacity.
- Higher dataset refresh rates: Microsoft has increased the data refresh limits in Power BI Premium from 8 per day to 48.
There are lots of features, facts, and scenarios in which Power BI Premium would be the best fit for your organization. Read up more of these features here. If interested in learning more about how you can upgrade, purchase, or get more information on Power BI premium, contact KTL Solutions today. Power BI Premium P1, P2, and P3 are available for purchase on June 14, 2017.
Source: Microsoft Power BI Premium White Paper May 2017; Image: Vuzion
ELIZABETH MORIS | Marketing Lead
Elizabeth is responsible for the development and management of KTL’s Marketing Department, while designing and overseeing marketing operations and campaign planning. With her creativity and design background, Elizabeth maintains KTL’s branding efforts, marketing plans, social media marketing, and performance improvement strategies. She also manages the cohesiveness of all collateral mediums, making sure KTL’s main image and goal are continuous. Her specialties include graphic design, content editing, event planning, tracking analytical data, public relations, integrated marketing, social media marketing, and print and web design. Elizabeth is proficient in Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office. She attained a Bachelor of Arts in Corporate Communications and Commercial Design from Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA and a Master of Arts in Publication Design from the University of Baltimore in Baltimore, MD.
