Microsoft has made its SSD storage service Azure Ultra Disk widely available in three of its cloud regions. The service is designed for data-intensive workloads.
Microsoft itself describes Azure Ultra Disk as a next-generation distributed block storage service designed to work with Azure virtual machines with high throughput and high input and output. That’s what Silicon Angle writes.
The service can be used for data-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top tier databases and workloads with many transactions, according to the company.
Much to suit
Users have many choices with Azure Ultra Disk. For example, it is possible to choose from various storage options from 4GB to 64 terabytes. It is also possible to adjust the throughput requirements from 300 megabits per second to 2,000 MB per second. The input/output operations can be set between 1,200 IOs per second and 160,000 IOs per second.
The advantage of all these possibilities to customize the service is that users can dynamically scale disk performance based on their workload requirements, without having to restart the virtual machines.
Settings can be adjusted continuously and become active within one hour.
Three copies
Azure Ultra Disk also uses local redundant storage to store three copies of the data in a single Azure Availability Zone.
They also rely on virtual disk client technology, which provides metadata on disk mappings. This allows the client to talk directly to the storage servers, reducing latency and requiring performance similar to enterprise flash disk arrays.
Azure Ultra Disk is now widely available in the East US 2, Northern Europe and Southeast Asia regions. Azure Ultra Disk has a price per hour, where the cost depends on the exact size of the disk and the configuration for the performance.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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