As you all are aware from Mark’s blog post, we launched Premium Storage on April 16th, 2015. First, we want to thank all the preview customers for trying out Premium Storage and for sharing feedback.
Premium Storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for I/O intensive workloads running on Azure Virtual Machines. You can attach several Premium Storage disks to a virtual machine (VM). With Premium Storage, your applications can have up to 32 TB of storage per VM and achieve 64,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per VM with extremely low latencies for read operations. Premium Storage is currently available only for storing data on disks used by Azure Virtual Machines.
Since we launched Preview in December of 2014, we worked with our Preview customers to validate Premium Storage in real-world scenarios. Based on their feedback, we made several improvements for performance and stability. Below are compelling updates in GA that we want to highlight:
- Enhanced IOPS/Throughput limit for cached disks: Cache-hits are no longer counted towards the allocated IOPS/Throughput of the disk. That is, when you use a data disk with ReadOnly cache setting on a DS-series VM, Reads that are served from the cache are not subject to Premium Storage disk limits. This will help you increase the IOPS and Throughput of the disks.
- Change the size of the disks: You can easily increase the size of existing disks. There is a PowerShell Cmdlet to increase the size of a 128 GB disk to 512 GB or 1 TB and increase the size of 512 GB disk to 1 TB.
- Support for more Linux distributions: With the release of Linux Integration Services v4.0 we have enabled support for even more Linux flavors. Please refer to Premium Storage Overview for specifics.
- Available in more regions: We launched Premium Storage preview in West US, East US 2 and West Europe. In addition to that, Premium Storage is now available in the following regions as well: East China, Southeast Asia and West Japan.
We also published Migrating to Azure Premium Storage article to provide guideline on how to migrate your disks, Virtual Machines (VMs) from on-premises or Standard Storage or a different cloud platform to Azure Premium Storage.
We will be presenting a Premium Storage technical deep dive session at Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago, IL. Please attend our session, if you are at Microsoft Ignite and want to learn more about Premium Storage.
As we always do, we would love to hear feedback via comments on this blog, Azure Storage MSDN forum or send email to mastoragequestions@microsoft.com.
Microsoft Azure Premium Storage Team
Resources
Mark Russinovich’s Blog Post which covers both the business logistics and technical overview
Premium Storage: High-Performance Storage for Azure Virtual Machine Workloads
Using Blob Service Operations with Azure Premium Storage
Migrating to Azure Premium Storage