Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Premium Storage and is available with an enterprise grade SLA. The real benefit of premium storage is that data can be stored on Solid State Drives (SSDs). It also provides high performance, low latency, disk storage with consistent performance delivery guarantees.
Premium storage is ideal for I/O-sensitive workloads and can be used to manage database workloads hosted within Virtual Machines. It is also possible to attach several premium storage disks to a single VM with support for 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.
With the help of Azure Premium Storage, developers will be able to run more demanding applications in addition to high-volume SQL Server, Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Exchange Server, MySQL, Oracle Database, IBM DB2, MongoDB, Cassandra and SAP solutions.
Azure Premium Storage stores 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 feature is only available in Azure.
As a developer, you can also optionally create snapshots of your disks and copy those snapshots to a Standard GRS storage account. This 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.
Microsoft has opened Azure Premium Storage in West US, East US 2, West Europe, East China, Southeast Asia and West Japan. However, Microsoft is planning to expand Azure Premium Storage to run in all Azure regions in the upcoming future.
In order to work with Azure Premium Storage, you need to navigate to the Microsoft Azure Management Portal and create a new Premium Storage account. After this, select Premium Locally Redundant storage option. However, you will be able to find this option only if you select a region where Premium Storage is available. Once this process has been completed, create a new VM and select the DS series of VM sizes. The DS series of VMs are highly optimized to work great with Premium Storage.
“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,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group.
Mark Russinovich has published a detailed blog post and also hosted a live demo on the recent release of Azure Premium Storage.
