Azure Files provisioned v2 is now generally available for SSD
For enterprise IT professionals or startup developers alike, cost efficiency for file storage is top of mind. Whether you're running mission-critical databases, production scale applications like SAP, or cloud native applications using file storage on AKS, your storage infrastructure should adapt to your workload - not the other way around. To bring this flexibility to your hands, we introduced the provisioned v2 model for the HDD (standard) media tier in 2024. Today, we are excited to announce that we're extending the provisioned v2 model to the SSD (premium) media tier.
Provisioned v2 is designed to give you more control, better performance alignment, and significant cost savings across a wide range of customer scenarios - by decoupling performance from capacity, lowering the minimum share size to 32 GiB, and increasing the maximum share size to 256 TiB. With provisioned v2 you can dynamically scale up or down your file share capacity or performance as needed without any downtime based on your workload pattern.
Right-sized performance for every workload
Whether you are running general purpose file shares, DevOps tooling, AI workflows or databases, you can benefit from leveraging the provisioned v2 model. Here are some examples:
- Database workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle®, MongoDB, and enterprise platforms like SAP and EPIC require high IOPS and throughput but minimal storage. With provisioned v2, you can secure needed performance without excess storage, resulting in substantial cost savings.
- Containerized workloads, like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), often use very small file shares to achieve shared storage between volumes. With provisioned v2, we've decreased the minimum share size from 100 GiB to 32 GiB and have enabled you to provision just the minimum IOPS and throughput that's included for free. This means that the minimum file share cost in Azure Files is going from $16 / month to just $3.20 / month - an 80% cost savings!
- Workloads that require fast fetch of infrequently used data, like media files, where the storage workload requires IOPS/throughput occasionally but requires the low latency upon retrieval that you can only get on SSD storage media. With provisioned v2, we've increased the maximum share size from 100 TiB to 256 TiB, enabling larger than ever file shares on Azure Files. And the flexible provisioning afforded by provisioned v2 enables you to dramatically decrease bundled IOPS/throughput to match the archive's requirements.
Let's take a deeper look at these savings with some sample workloads:
| Workload scenario | Provisioned v1 | Provisioned v2 | Cost savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workload using defaults for IOPS and throughput 10 TiB storage, ~13K IOPS, ~1.1 GiB / sec throughput | $1,638.40 / month | $1,341.09 / month | 18% |
| Relational database workload 4 TiB storage, 20K IOPS, 1.5 GiB / sec throughput | $2,720 / month | $925.42 / month | 66% |
| Hot archive for multimedia 100 TiB storage, 15K IOPS, 2 GiB / sec throughput | $16,384.00 / month | $10,641.93 / month | 35% |
To learn more about how to compare your costs between the provisioned v2 and provisioned v1 models, see understanding the costs of the provisioned v2 model. All pricing comparisons are shown using the West US 2 prices for locally redundant storage (LRS).
Top reasons to give provisioned v2 a try
If you haven't looked at Azure Files before, now is the best time to get started. Here's why you should look at making the move to Azure Files with provisioned v2 SSD:
- Affordable, with low entry costs starting at just $3.20/month.
- Flexible and customizable to fit a wide range of requirements.
- Easy to understand and predictable pricing.
- Support for high IOPS and low latency performance, ideal for performance-critical applications that require sustained throughput and rapid data access.
- Support for unpredictable or burst-heavy usage patterns, ensuring smooth performance under variable demand.
- Scalable sizing options, with SSD file shares ranging from 32 GiB to 256 TiB - well-suited for workloads with smaller footprints.
How it works
With the provisioned v2 model, IOPS and throughput are recommended to you based on the amount of provisioned storage you select, however this recommendation is completely overridable by you. If your workload needs more IOPS or throughput than the default recommendations, you can provision more without having to provision a bunch of extra storage. And if your workload needs less than the default recommendation, you can decrease the provisioned IOPS and throughput all the way down to the minimums for a file share.
The best part of this is that you don't have to get this right on file share creation: if you don't know what your performance requirements are or your workload's patterns change over time, you can dynamically scale up or down your file share's provisioning as needed, without any downtime. The provisioned v2 file share also gives you all of the telemetry needed to monitor your workload's used IOPS and throughput usage, enabling you to continuously tune your file share to your workload.
Getting started is easy
Provisioned v2 for SSD is available right now, in all public cloud regions (see provisioned v2 availability for details). Simply select "Azure Files" for primary service, "Premium" for performance, and "Provisioned v2" for billing when creating your storage account in the Azure Portal.
To learn more about how to get started, see:
Microsoft