We’re excited to announce the general availability for the premium-series hardware generation for Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Premium-series hardware generation in Azure SQL Managed instance offer industry-leading performance and price/performance amongst SQL Server cloud database services, providing a perfect platform for you to migrate more of your large database applications to the cloud.
We're planning to announce the general availability for the memory optimized premium-series hardware generation in the fall of this year, so stay tuned for more updates.
Introduction
Premium-series hardware generation is based on the latest generation of Intel® Xeon Scalable processors (3rd gen - Ice Lake) and offers more storage and more memory per vCore to meet the needs of your most resource-intensive database workloads.
The following table summarizes the key technical details for the new premium-series hardware generations in SQL Managed Instance:
|
|
Standard-series (Gen 5) |
Premium-series |
|
CPU |
Intel® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell), Intel® SP-8160 (Skylake) and Intel® 8272CL (Cascade Lake) 2.5 GHz processors |
Intel® 8370C (Ice Lake) 2.8 GHz processors |
|
Number of vCores |
4-80 vCores |
4-80 vCores |
|
Memory |
5.1 GB per vCore Max 408 GB per instance |
7 GB per vCore Max 560 GB per instance |
|
Max instance reserved storage (depending on the number of vCores) |
General Purpose: up to 16 TB Business Critical: up to 4 TB |
General Purpose: up to 16 TB Business Critical: up to 5.5 TB |
|
vCore price difference |
- |
+15% over standard-series |
Key characteristics for SQL Managed Instance hardware configurations
With the move to General Availability milestone, premium-series hardware generation is now available in most public Azure regions, including regions near you!
Industry-leading performance and value for SQL Server cloud database services
In May of this year, Principled Technologies published a paper comparing the performance and price/performance of Azure SQL Managed Instance and AWS RDS for SQL Server across several database benchmarks. Here's the excerpt from the report:
Principled Technologies compared the cost and performance of three instances each of two managed cloud instance services: Azure SQL Managed Instance and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server. Across those three sets of instances using three common SQL Server database workloads— two for online transaction processing and one for data analysis—Azure SQL Managed Instance significantly outperformed Amazon RDS. Offering between double and five times the performance depending on the workload, the three SQL Managed Instances we tested also offered better overall value, reducing price/performance by as much as 90.3 percent.
These three Azure SQL Managed Instances could offer better overall value in two ways. First, their significantly better price/performance ratio shrinks cloud operating costs compared to their competitors in one-to-one comparisons. Second, these SQL Managed Instances could potentially reduce the number of instances an organization has to purchase to handle expected customer loads.
For more details, read the full report on Three Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instances offered better SQL Server performance and value than their Amazon RDS counterparts
Availability of Reserved Instance pricing
We’re planning to provide the Reserved Instance pricing for the premium-series in Azure SQL Managed Instance later this calendar year. This will allow you to further improve the fantastic value you’re getting for your money with Azure SQL Managed Instance.
For more details, please see the SQL Managed Instance pricing page.
Summary
In this article, we introduced the general availability for the new premium-series hardware generation that make Azure SQL Managed Instance a great fit for more of your high-performance and memory-intensive database applications.
Next steps:
- Create your first premium-series SQL Managed Instance in one of the supported regions and enjoy the blazing-fast performance for your database workloads!
- Get started with SQL Managed Instance with our Quick Start reference guide.
- Learn more about Azure SQL Managed Instance capabilities and premium-series hardware generations
- Read the report by Principled Technologies comparing the performance and price/perf of Azure SQL Managed Instance and AWS RDS
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