Announcing General Availability of Azure Premium Storage
I’m very excited to announce the general availability release of Azure Premium Storage. It is now available with an enterprise grade SLA and is available for everyone to use.
Microsoft Azure now offers two types of storage: Premium Storage and Standard Storage. Premium Storage stores data durably on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and provides high performance, low latency, disk storage with consistent performance delivery guarantees.
Premium Storage is ideal for I/O-sensitive workloads - and is especially great for database workloads hosted within Virtual Machines. You can optionally attach several premium storage disks to a single VM, and support up to 32 TB of disk storage per Virtual Machine and drive more than 64,000 IOPS per VM at less than 1 millisecond latency for read operations. This provides an incredibly fast storage option that enables you to run even more workloads in the cloud.
Using Premium Storage, Azure now offers the ability run more demanding applications - including high-volume SQL Server, Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Exchange Server, MySQL, Oracle Database, IBM DB2, MongoDB, Cassandra, and SAP solutions.
Durability
Durability of data is of utmost importance for any persistent storage option. Azure customers have critical applications that depend on the persistence of their data and high tolerance against failures. Premium Storage keeps three replicas of data within the same region, and ensures that a write operation will not be confirmed back until it has been durably replicated. This is a unique cloud capability provided only be Azure today.
In addition, you can also optionally create snapshots of your disks and copy those snapshots to a Standard GRS storage account - which enables you to maintain a geo-redundant snapshot of your data that is stored > 400 miles away from your primary Azure region for disaster recovery purposes.
Available Regions
Premium Storage is available today in the following Azure regions:
- West US
- East US 2
- West Europe
- East China
- Southeast Asia
- West Japan
We will expand Premium Storage to run in all Azure regions in the near future.
Getting Started
You can easily get started with Premium Storage starting today. Simply go to the Microsoft Azure Management Portal and create a new Premium Storage account. You can do this by creating a new Storage Account and selecting the “Premium Locally Redundant” storage option (note: this option is only listed if you select a region where Premium Storage is available).
Then create a new VM and select the “DS” series of VM sizes. The DS-series of VMs are optimized to work great with Premium Storage. When you create the DS VM you can simply point it at your Premium Storage account and you’ll be all set.
Learning More
Learn more about Premium Storage from Mark Russinovich's blog post on today's release. You can also see a live 3 minute demo of Premium Storage in action by watching Mark Russinovich’s video on premium storage. In it Mark shows both a Windows Server and Linux VM driving more than 64,000 disk IOPS with low latency against a durable drive powered by Azure Premium Storage.
You can also visit the following links for more information:
- Premium Storage overview
- Premium Storage REST operations
- "DS" series VM specifications
- Channel 9 video on Premium Storage
Summary
We are very excited about the release of Azure Premium Storage. Premium Storage opens up so many new opportunities to use Azure to run workloads in the cloud – including migrating existing on-premises solutions.
As always, we would love to hear feedback via comments on this blog, the Azure Storage MSDN forum or send email to mastoragequestions@microsoft.com.
Hope this helps,
Scott