SQL MI Business Critical service tier was already the most performant PaaS service to way to run SQL Server in the cloud, but we’re further improving price/performance ratio and customers total cost of ownership (TCO) by introducing several highly requested improvements.
- Azure SQL MI Business Critical service tier customers are getting faster performance for the same price
- By introducing more hardware flexibility in storage and CPU areas for Business Critical service tier, we are unlocking potential savings for the customers whose workloads have specific and more granular resource requirements.
Today, we are announcing a significant refresh for the Business Critical service tier on premium & premium-series memory optimized hardware, focused on democratization of the hardware choices:
- More throughput for the Transaction Log, that focuses on increasing write speed improvement; (already released)
- More CPU vCores for the individual managed instances, increasing overall performance of the complex database workloads by allowing up to 128vCore sizes in premium-series hardware; (already released)
- More storage at lower CPU vCores (New!)
- More choices for the number of CPU vCores: a feature that allows more granular selection of different hardware configurations; (New!)
- Increased maximum instance storage for the premium-series hardware by supporting up to 16 TB; (New!)
- Improved hardware diversity through the support for premium-series memory optimized hardware in all regions (New!)
Even better news for our customers is that all these announced features are available worldwide* for both premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware without additional cost. The only exception is the support for 16 TB storage in the premium-series, which is available in a subset of Azure regions.
Let’s delve into each of the announcements one by one:
More storage at lower CPU vCores
With this improvement we are enabling customer workloads to double the size of the storage space on Azure SQL Managed Instance starting with certain numbers of CPU vCores on smaller instances up to 48 CPU vCores up to and to save money on the costly CPU vCore increases.
The 2x increase in the addressable storage space for those Azure SQL Managed Instance configurations will result in significant savings for the customers.
Below you can see the effective changes for both the premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware options regarding the addressable storage space.
For Business Critical premium-series hardware:
|
|
Previously |
Now |
|
8 vCores+ |
1 TB |
2 TB |
|
16 vCores+ |
2 TB |
4 TB |
|
24 vCores+ |
2 TB |
5.5 TB |
For Business Critical premium-series memory optimized hardware:
|
|
Previously |
Now |
|
8 vCores+ |
1 TB |
2 TB |
|
16 vCores+ |
2 TB |
4 TB |
|
24 vCores+ |
2 TB |
5.5 TB |
|
32 vCores+ |
4 TB |
8 TB |
|
48 vCores+ |
4 TB |
12 TB |
Mixing with the previous item of more choices for the number of CPU vCores for the premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware this will result in availability of 2 TB of storage space for the 10 and 12 CPU vCore options, 4 TB for the 20 CPU vCore options,
For the ever-expanding and space-hungry workloads this improvement will give customers the opportunity of very significant cost savings through avoiding payment of additional CPU vCore licenses.
For the swiftly storage space consuming workloads, this will result in improved stability – through less hardware upgrades and failovers, your Azure SQL Managed Instance will have less downtime. For example, customers on 8 CPU vCores instance will be able to do with just a single upgrade to 16 CPU vCores instead of increases to 16 and then 32 CPU vCores previously.
More choices for the number of CPU vCores for the premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware
Customers have been asking for more CPU vCore selection options, allowing them to customize their workloads growth and enabling them to optimize their spendings.
Until recently, customers have had the 8 choices for the premium-series and premium-series memory optimized hardware (4,8,16,24,32,40,64,80 CPU vCores) as shown in the picture below:
Today we are introducing the expansion of the available choices by doubling them for both hardware series (premium-series and premium-series memory optimized) up to 16 possible options (4,6,8,10,12,16,20,24,32,40,48,56,64,80,96 & 128 CPU vCores)
This new option will allow customers to scale their workloads more granularly, enabling them to optimize their costs through more measured increases of CPU vCores or allowing consolidation to take place without paying for the extra cores.
For customers running heavy workloads on 8 CPU vCore Azure SQL MI, they have now the choice to avoid increasing their spending twice right away – by introducing 10 & 12 CPU vCores options, we are enabling them to scale their workloads with more precision and less spending. This enables customers to save 75% of the costs for the 10 CPU vCores and 50% of the additional costs for the 12 CPU vCores option.
More storage for the premium-series by supporting up to 16 TB
In Azure SQL Managed Instance on Business Critical service tier, to be able to use 16 TB of storage (times 4 = 64 TB, since BC is running 4 synchronous replicas with shared-nothing storage), customers have had to pick blazingly fast but expensive premium-series memory optimized hardware option with 64 or more CPU vCores.
For the scenario, where customers are looking to consolidate 3 Azure SQL Managed Instances where each instance is using 16 CPU vCores – this is now possible with a single 48 CPU vCores instance configuration. Previously, customers only had the option of selecting a 64 CPU vCore Azure SQL Managed Instance, resulting in a 33% price increase as compared to a 48 CPU vCores.
This is another option for customers to optimize their spendings and if the workload does not require the throughput and the amount of memory of the premium-series memory optimized hardware, the regular premium-series hardware will offer the 16 TB storage at significantly lower cost – and the lower difference in the price will impact on per-CPU vCore basis!
More hardware diversity through the support for premium-series memory optimized hardware in all regions
Customers have been asking for premium-series memory optimized hardware support in every region on Azure. We understand that the fastest CPU available for the Azure SQL Managed Instance can be crucial for the critical customer workloads and we are dedicated to bringing this option to every Azure region.
We are happy to announce that today, in the all Azure regions, we are introducing the possibility of using up to 40 CPU vCores of premium-series memory optimized hardware, thus democratizing the usage of the fastest available CPU with the largest amount of memory per CPU vCore (13.6 GB per each vCore) for Azure SQL Managed Instance.
This means that the new state for premium-series memory optimized hardware availability is:
- up to 40 vCores: available in every Azure region
- 48, 56, 64, 80, 96 & 128 vCore options: for now, available in subset of Azure regions
Bundled together with the support for the Reserved Instances that we have announced today, this option will give customers the possibility of achieving significant cost savings while still ensuring the highest performance for their database workloads.
In the table below, you can find the list of all the regions supporting premium-series memory optimized hardware:
|
Geography |
Regions supporting memory optimized premium-series HW |
|
Europe |
France Central, Germany West Central, Italy North, North Europe, Poland Central, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, UK South, West Europe |
|
Middle East, Africa |
Qatar Central |
|
Americas |
Brazil South, Canada Central, Central US, East US, East US 2, North Central US, South Central US, West US, West US 2, West US 3 |
|
Asia Pacific |
Australia East, Australia Southeast, China North 3, India Central, India South, East Asia, Japan East, Southeast Asia |
This gives an opportunity for every customer around the world to have the highest speed and throughput with Azure SQL Managed Instance fastest available hardware.
Summary
In this article, we introduced the major updates to Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical service tier which further improve the price/performance and TCO (total cost of ownership) by providing more performance and better resource sizing flexibility at no additional cost.
Next steps:
- Get started with SQL Managed Instance with our Quick Start reference guide.
- Learn more about the latest innovation in Azure SQL Managed Instance
