New Era of Azure Ultra Disk: Experience Next-Gen of Mission-critical Block Storage

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

Since its launch at Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Ultra Disk has powered some of the world’s most demanding applications and workloads: From real-time financial trading and electronic health records to high-performance gaming and AI/ML services.

Ultra Disk was a breakthrough in cloud block storage innovation from the start, introducing independent configuration of capacity, IOs, and throughput to deliver precise performance at scale. And we’ve continued to push boundaries ever since. Committing to a purposeful evolution, not just enhancing performance and resilience for mission-critical workloads but working to ensure every advancement addresses the real-world needs of our customers.

These advancements are not just theoretical; they’re driving real impact for customers operating on a global scale. One example being BlackRock, a global asset manager and technology provider, who leverages Azure Ultra Disk in conjunction with M-series VMs to power their mission-critical investment platform, Aladdin. For BlackRock, delivering ultra-low latency and exceptional reliability is paramount to swiftly adapting to dynamic market conditions and managing portfolios with agility and confidence. (Read the full customer story).

“Now that we’re on Azure, we have a springboard to unlock adoption of cloud-managed services to be able to engineer and operate at greater scale and adopt innovative technologies“. Said Randall Fradin, head, cloud managed services and platform engineering, BlackRock

Stories like BlackRock’s illustrate the power of Ultra Disk in action and they inspire us to keep evolving. That’s why today, we are excited to unveil a transformative update to Ultra Disk, designed to deliver superior speed, resilience, and cost efficiency for your most sensitive workloads. This major refresh introduces higher performance, greater flexibility to optimize coast, and instant access snapshots to support business continuity. With these advancements, Ultra Disk empowers organizations to accelerate operations, restore data rapidly, and scale with confidence–no matter the level of demand or criticality.

What’s new with Ultra Disk?

Ultra Disk delivers reliable performance with improved average, P99.9, and outlier latency
For mission-critical workloads, even brief disruptions can have significant impacts. That is why we have prioritized reducing tail latency at P99.9 and above. Our platform enhancements have resulted in 80% reduction in both P99.9 and outlier latency, along with a 30% improvement in average latency. These advancements make Ultra Disk the best choice for highly I/O-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads, such as transaction logs for mission-critical applications.

If you are using local SSD or Write Accelerator to achieve lower latencies, we recommend exploring Ultra Disk as an alternative option for enhanced data persistency and greater flexibility for capacity and performance.

Optimize application cost without sacrificing performance
Our goal is to support workload in maximizing both efficiency and performance. Ultra Disk’s latest provisioning model now offers greater granular control over capacity and performance, enabling better cost management. Workloads on small disks can save up to 50% while large disks can save up to 25%. These updated features are now available for both new and existing Ultra Disks:

A financial application operates its core database on Ultra Disk to serve market trend insight. This database stores large amount of data but only require moderate IOs and throughput at low latency when needed (no more than 12,500GiB, 5000 IOs and 200MB/s). With more flexible control over capacity and performance, this deployment now saves 22% from its Ultra Disk spending, illustrated below using East US prices.

Unlock high performance workloads on Azure Boost and Ultra Disk
Ultra Disk and Azure Boost now enable a new class of high-performance workloads: 

• Memory Optimized Mbv3 VM – Standard_M416bs_v3 – GA, up to 550,000 IOs and 10GB/s

• Azure Boost Ebdsv5 VM – GA up to 400,000 IOs and 10GB/s

• Stay tuned for newest Azure Boost VM announcement at 2025 Ignite for unprecedented remote Block Storage performance

These innovations empower customers to confidently operate high-demand applications such as large-scale SQL databases, electronic health record systems, and mission-critical enterprise platforms. Ultra Disk is equipped to address rigorous performance requirements leveraging the latest advancements in VM technology.

Instant Access Snapshot enables you to restore and run your business application immediately
We are thrilled to announce an exciting new experience: Instant Access Snapshot for Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disks, now available in public preview. With Instant Access, you can immediately use snapshots after creation to generate new disks, eliminating the wait time (often spanning numerous hours) traditionally required for background data copy before the snapshot is in a ready and usable state. Disks generated from these Instant Access Snapshots now hydrate up to 10x faster and experience minimal read latency impact during the hydration process. This advanced capability marks a significant leap forward in the public cloud market, enabling rapid recovery and replication scale-out for your organization in real time. No more lengthy restoration processes or costly downtime! Instant Access Snapshot empowers you to get back to business within moments, not hours.

Building on the foundation of security, flexibility, and efficiency for Ultra Disk
Let’s walk through a few other features recently released that will greatly enhance your high-performance workload experience on Ultra Disk.

• Operate with cost-efficiency by expanding your Ultra Disk capacity live with the support of live resize and dynamically adjusting Ultra Disk performance to avoid over provisioning. 

• Run your business application securely with encryption at host on Ultra Disk. Encryption at host will encrypt your data starting from the VM host and then store the encrypted data in Ultra Disk.

• Azure Site Recovery – Recover your VM applications with Ultra Disk seamlessly in another Azure region when your primary region is down.

• Azure VM Backup – Backup your VM applications equipped with Ultra Disk easily and securely.

• Azure Disk Backup – Backup a specific Ultra Disk that is critical to your business operation to lower your backup cost and for more customized backup operations.

• Third party backup and DR support: We understand that you may have preferred third party service for your backup and DR procedures. Check out the 3rd-party services here that now support Ultra Disk.

• Migrate your clustered application to Azure as-is that uses SCSI Persistent Reservations to Ultra Disk with shared disk capability. Shared disk capability unlocks easy migration and further cost optimization for your mission-critical clustered applications.

Getting started: Unlock new possibilities for your business
Join us on this journey to redefine what’s possible for your mission critical business applications. With Azure Ultra Disk, you can experience the future of high-performance storage today, empowering your organization to move faster, recover instantly, and scale with confidence.

Resources:
New to Ultra Disk? Start with comprehensive documentation and how to deploy an Ultra Disk.