From Microsoft, Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage in Preview

By Aung Oo, GM, Azure Storage, Microsoft Corp.

We are excited to announce the preview of Premium SSD v2, the next gen of Microsoft Azure Premium SSD Disk Storage.

This new disk offering provides the most advanced block storage solution designed for a broad range of IO-intensive enterprise production workloads that require sub-millisecond disk latencies as well as high IO/s and throughput at a low cost. With Premium SSD v2, you can provision up to 64TB of storage capacity, 80,000 IO/s, and 1,200MB/s throughput on a single disk. With best-in-class IO/s and bandwidth, Premium SSD v2 provides the most flexible and scalable general-purpose block storage in the cloud, enabling you to meet the ever-growing demands of your production workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, Mongo DB, big data, analytics, gaming, on VMs, or stateful containers. Moreover, with Premium SSD v2, you can provision granular disk sizes, IO/s, and throughput independently based on your workload needs, providing you more flexibility in managing performance and costs.

With the launch of Premium SSD v2, Azure Disk Storage portfolio includes one of the comprehensive sets of disk storage offerings to satisfy workloads ranging from tier-1 IO/s intensive workloads such as SAP HANA to general purpose workloads such as RDMS and NoSQL databases and cost-sensitive Dev/Test workloads.

Benefits of Premium SSD v2
As customers transition their production workloads to the cloud or deploy new cloud-native applications, balancing performance and cost is top of mind. For example, transaction-intensive database workloads may require high IO/s on a small disk size or a gaming application may need very high IO/s during peak hours. Similarly, big data applications like Cloudera/Hadoop may require high throughput at a low cost. Hence, customers need the flexibility to scale their IO/s and throughput independent of the disk size. With Premium SSD v2, you can customize disk performance to precisely meet your workload requirements or seasonal demands, without the need to provision additional storage capacity.

Premium SSD v2 also enables to provision storage capacity ranging from 1GB up to 64TB with gigabyte increments. All Premium SSD v2 disks provide a baseline performance of 3,000 IO/s and 125MB/s. If your disk requires higher performance, you can provision the required IO/s and throughput at a low cost, up to the max limits shown below. You can dynamically scale up or scale down the IO/s and throughput as needed without downtime, allowing you to manage disk performance cost-effectively while avoiding the maintenance overhead of striping multiple disks to achieve more performance.

Summarizing the key benefits:

• Granular disk size in 1GB increments.

• Independent provisioning of IO/s, throughput, and gigabyte.

• Consistent sub-millisecond latency.

• Easier maintenance with scaling performance up and down without downtime.

Premium SSD v2, like all other Azure Disk Storage offerings, will provide our industry data durability and high availability at general availability.

Following is summary comparing Premium SSD v2 with current Premium SSD and Ultra Disk:

Supported Azure VM
Premium SSD v2 can be used with any premium storage-enabled VM sizes enabling you to leverage a diverse set of virtual machine sizes. Currently, it can only be used as data disks. Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs can be used as OS disks for VM using Premium SSD v2 data disks.

Pricing
Premium SSD v2 disks are billed hourly based on the provisioned capacity, IO/s, and MB/s. Let’s take an example of a disk that you provision with 100GB capacity, 5000 IO/s, and 150MB/s throughput.

• The disks are billed per gigabyte of the provisioned capacity. Hence, you will be charged for 100GB of the provisioned capacity.

• The disks are billed for any additional IO/s provisioned over the free baseline of 3,000 IO/s. In this case, since you provisioned 5,000 IO/s, you will be billed for the additional 2,000 IO/s.

• The disks are billed for any additional throughput over the free baseline throughput of 125MB/s. In this case, since you provisioned 150MB/s throughput, you will be billed for the additional 25MB/s throughput.

Azure Managed Disks pricing page.

Getting Started
Premium SSD v2 is currently available in preview in select regions. If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can request access to get started. Once enrolled in the preview program, you will be able to create and manage Premium SSD v2 via the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI SDKs. You can refer to the Premium SSD v2 documentation to learn more.