Microsoft Azure announced today the general availability of Azure Premium Storage. Unlike Azure Standard Storage that stores data on HDDs, Azure Premium Storage stores data on SSDs. That means workloads that require high I/O performance and low latency such as: OLTP, Big Data, and Data Warehousing on platforms like SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others can now be moved into the cloud.
Microsoft Azure announced today the general availability of Azure Premium Storage. Unlike Azure Standard Storage that stores data on HDDs, Azure Premium Storage stores data on SSDs. That means workloads that require high I/O performance and low latency such as: OLTP, Big Data, and Data Warehousing on platforms like SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others can now be moved into the cloud.
Premium Storage Preview was launched last December enabling thousands of Azure customers to try out its capabilities. Customers have reported tremendous improvement Virtual Machines’ performance. Customers using Premium Storage Preview ran a wide range of scenarios like Windows Server, Linux, SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle, SAP, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis and others.
Premium Storage Preview customers’ feedback states:
- Backup of a 2 TB SQL Server database is 6 times faster on Premium Storage than the same operation performed on Standard Storage
- Restore of a 2 TB SQL database is 30 times faster on Premium Storage than the same operation performed on Standard Storage
- Write throughput to a SQL database running on Premium Storage is 2 times the write throughput on the same database running on an on-premise mid-level SAN
Premium Storage is available for Page Blobs and Data Disks used by Azure Virtual Machines. Users can provision a Premium Storage Data Disk with the right performance characteristics to meet their requirements. Multiple disks can be attached to a VM enabling up to 32TB of storage per VM with more than 64,000 IOPS per VM at low-millisecond latency for read operations.
Azure Premium Storage achieves its performance through a combination of durable Azure storage (built on locally redundant storage where three data replicas are stored within the same local region), and server side SSD caches made available to DS series VMs. And Azure Premium Storage supports more Linus flavors with the release of Linux Integration Services v4.0.
Availability and pricing
Azure Premium Storage is available now in certain regions starting as low as $0.024/GB for locally redundant storage.
