Microsoft Azure Ultra Disk Storage Managed Disks Delivers Scalable Performance With Sub-Millisecond Latency

From Tad Brockway, corporate VP, Azure Storage, media, and edge, posted on August 15, 2019

Announcing the availability of Azure Ultra Disk Storage

We are announcing the availability (GA) of Microsoft Azure Ultra Disk Storage – a managed disks offering that delivers scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency for the demanding Azure VMs and container workloads.

With Ultra Disk Storage, customers are now able to lift-and-shift mission critical enterprise applications to the cloud including applications like SAP HANA, top tier SQL databases such as SQL Server, Oracle DB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra.

With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure offers 4 types of persistent disks-Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. This portfolio gives customers a set of disk offerings for every workload.

Ultra Disk Storage is designed to provide customers with flexibility when choosing the right performance characteristics for their workloads. Customers can now have granular control on the size, IO/s, and bandwidth of Ultra Disk Storage to meet their specific performance requirements.

Organizations can achieve the maximum I/O limit of a VM with Ultra Disk Storage without having to stripe multiple disks. Check out the blog post Azure Ultra Disk Storage: Microsoft’s service for your most I/O demanding workloads from Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure, for a deep under-the-hood view.

Since we launched the preview for Ultra Disk Storage last September, our customers have used this capability on Azure on a range of workloads and have achieved new levels of performance and scale on the public cloud to maximize their VM performance.

“Ultra Disk Storage enabled SEGA to seamlessly migrate from our on-premise datacenter to Azure and take advantage of flexible performance controls,” said Takaya Segawa, GM/creative officer, SEGA.

“Ultra Disk Storage allows us to achieve incredible write performance for our most demanding PostgreSQL database workloads – giving us the ability to scale our applications in Azure,” said Andrew Tindula, senior IT manager, Online Trading Academy.

Ultra Disk Storage performance characteristics
Ultra Disk Storage offers sizes ranging from 4GB up to 64TB with granular increments. In addition, it is possible to dynamically configure and scale the IO/s and bandwidth on the disk independent of capacity.

Customers can maximize disk performance by leveraging:

• Up to 300 IO/s/GB, to a maximum of 160,000 IO/s per disk

• Up to a maximum of 2,000MB/s per disk

Ultra Disk is available in East US 2, North Europe, and Southeast Asia. Refer to the FAQ for latest supported regions.

For pricing details for Ultra Disk, refer to the pricing page. The availability price takes effect from October 1, 2019 unless otherwise noted. Customers in preview will automatically transition to GA pricing on this date. No additional action is required by customers in preview.

You can request onboarding to Azure Ultra Disk Storage by submitting an online request or by reaching out to a Microsoft rep.