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.

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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.

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You can also visit the following links for more information:

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

13 Comments

  • All my current vm's, virtual network and my on-promise network are located in East US. Do you plan on making premium storage available to East US? The new SSD vm needs to be part of my existing virtual network, or do I have to migrate everything to East US 2?
    Thanks

  • Hi John, yes, we have plans to make premium storage available in East US. Once it is available in that location, you can use your existing virtual network for SSD VMs as well by changing it to a Regional virtual network.

  • Learn more about Premium Storage from Mark Russinovich's blog post on today's release....
    This is great news…

  • Any ETA when Premium Storage will be available in the Australia data centers ?

    Would love to upgrade our enterprise SQL instance to use Premium storage.

  • Hi Ron - Australia is coming up very soon. We are not able to share an exact ETA at this time.

  • "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."

    Does that mean the write operation gets its confirmation only after the 3 copies have been safely stored on SSDs or is it a controller-level confirmation? It's not clear from the post you've referenced. What type of SSDs are we dealing with here? What type of network (iSCSI, GbE, InfiniBand)? It's pointless to have faster storage without a large-enough pipe.

  • Hi Maximus - Thanks for the feedback. Write operation gets confirmation only after saving 3 copies on SSDs. Performance specifications of Premium Storage disks and VMs are as mentioned on our documentation page (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-premium-storage-preview-portal/)

  • Thanks to development of technology, everything is getting bigger and bigger. Hope that no one push the off button of internet :)

  • What's the up time reliability of this new feature? Given the damage you've done to my business I would rather have availability than speed. Perf does me no good if the damned thing isn't working.

  • Thank You.Thanks to development of technology, everything is getting bigger and bigger.

  • This comment is meant for 'Introducing ASP.NET 5'. Gu, We have all praised the ASP.MVC and Web API as great techs and the General move towards open source. But killing Webform will be catastrophic for microsoft dev community. I noticed you didn't respond to all the questions around the future of WebForm. WebForm is hands down the best for CRUD-heavy Enterprise developments. Its even-driven model makes life a lot easier. Some of us don't care about 'close-to-the-metal' dev story, we care about productivity !!

  • thanks a lot
    i like your article
    i see per day your website and article

  • how does the premium storage cost balances compare to dedicated storage.. any chart ?

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