Azure Premium Storage released by Microsoft, now generally available

Sean Cameron

Azure

Azure users have something to crow about, Microsoft has announced the General Availability of Premium Storage for the service, beginning now.

For those with particularly demanding storage needs, Premium Storage provides a more secure and flexible option that is better suited to specialist situations and requirements. All Premium data is stored on Solid State Drives (SSD), which have the advantage of being faster and more reliable than conventional Hard Disk Drives (HDD) on which all other, Standard, data will be stored.

The availability of this service comes following a preview that has taken place since December 2014, in which thousands of Azure customers participated and provided their feedback regarding its advanced capabilities, which include attaching multiple disks to a VM, enabling up to 32 TB of storage per VM with more than 64,000 IOPS per VM at low-millisecond latency for read operations now possible.

A major focus behind the introduction of Premium Storage has been the improvement of the service in meeting the needs of those who run Virtual Machines (VM), and as such the service is now available for Page Blobs and Data Disks. Premium Storage is currently available in West US, East US 2, West Europe, East China, Southeast Asia and West Japan.

Pricing details of the service can be found here. Microsoft estimates that with the introduction of SSDs, the backup of a 2TB server is now on average 6 times faster than is possible to achieve with a HDD, which is a significant improvement. The service isn’t just available for those running Windows, it is also compatible with a number of different Linux flavors, meaning that many can take advantage of this new service.

If your business has significant or complicated storage needs, this looks to be a worthwhile upgrade. To wade a little deeper into the finer details of all of the improvements and abilities that Azure Premium Storage brings, head here.

Will your company be upgrading to Azure Premium Storage? Let us know in the comments below.