Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage: General Availability

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Premium SSD v2, the next generation of Microsoft Azure Premium SSD Disk Storage that offers the most advanced general purpose block storage solution with the best price-performance. Premium SSD v2 offers sub-millisecond disk latencies for demanding IO-intensive workloads at a low-cost. Customers can use that to improve the price-performance of a broad range of enterprise production workloads such as—SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, Mongo DB, big data, analytics, gaming, on virtual machines, or stateful containers.

With Premium SSD v2, you can specify a disk size ranging from 1 GiB up to 64 TiBs, with 1-GiB increments. On a single disk, you can provision up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,200 MBPS throughput. Consider having a large SQL Server database that uses a single data disk to provide all the storage capacity and performance you need! Premium SSD v2 provides great flexibility for managing performance and cost for your production environment. For example, customers can separately provision granular disk sizes, IOPS, and throughput based on their workload requirements. Furthermore, customers can dynamically scale up or down the performance as needed without downtime based on the application needs, allowing them to manage performance cost-effectively. Each Premium SSD v2 disk comes with a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/sec, irrespective of the provisioned size. For example, if you create a disk with 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/sec, you have to pay for only the GiB of the disk. If your disk requires even higher performance, you can provision the required IOPS and throughput at a low cost, up to the max limits. Like all other Azure Disk Storage offerings, Premium SSD v2 provides our industry-leading data durability and high availability.

Since we launched the preview for Premium SSD v2 last July, our customers have used this capability on Azure for a wide range of workloads. In addition, our partners enabled their Backup and Disaster Recovery solution for Premium SSD v2. Here are some quotes from customers and partners:

“Adding Premium V2 storage to any VM is quick and easy and with Carbonite Migrate, you can move data from any storage solution onto Premium V2 with no business impact and no user outage until cutover.  Switching to Premium V2 Storage with Carbonite Migrate can be as simple as remounting a volume.  There are no restrictions about crossing zones and regions with Carbonite Migrate into your Premium V2 storage either.  You can even use Carbonite Availability for fast recovery or as a Backup option to your production servers across regions.”

- Jody Guffey, Vice President, Americas Sales, Carbonite

“Premium SSD v2 disks have enabled us to reach an appealing pricing point for our customers who require high IOPS and throughput without the additional storage capacity and higher cost that are normally associated with striping Premium SSD disks to achieve target performance. The ability to change IOPS/throughput with scripts during peak hours without affecting customers adds to an already appealing feature.”

- Josh Canoy, Cloud Architect, Continental Utility Solutions, Inc.

We are now recommending all SQL Server workloads running on Ebsv5 virtual machines in supported regions to run on Premium SSD v2 for the best price-performance offering on Azure. From our analysis, we have found that Premium SSD v2 is up to 52% cheaper compared to Premium SSD and offers up to an 18% improvement in performance. Performance increases are highest with transactional workloads (OLTP), where our IOPS and latency improvements with Premium SSD V2 make a big difference. SQL Server runs best on Azure and now it runs even better backed by Premium SSD V2

Premium SSD v2 is certified for SAP HANA workloads! During development of Premium SSD v2, we tested with SAP workload certification tests. We found that Premium SSD v2 disks provide consistent sub-millisecond latencies and throughput to meet the SAP HANA requirements. Premium SSD v2 can be used for both the SAP HANA Data and Log volumes. Using Premium SSD v2, customers can manage disk performance cost-effectively while simplifying the operational overhead to drive performance for the SAP HANA workloads.

Comparison of Premium SSD v2 with the current Premium SSD and Ultra Disk.

With the launch of Premium SSD v2, Azure now offers the most comprehensive set of disk offerings for every general-purpose workload.

Supported Azure Virtual Machines

Premium SSD v2 can be used with any premium storage-enabled virtual machines sizes. Currently, Premium SSD v2 can only be used as data disks. We recommend Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs as the OS disks for virtual machines using Premium SSD v2 as the data disks.

Billing

Premium SSD v2 disks are billed hourly based on the provisioned capacity, IOPS, and MBPS. Let’s take an example of a disk that you provision with 100 GiB capacity, 5,000 IOPS, and 150 MBPS throughput.

• The disks are billed per GiB of the provisioned capacity. Hence, you will be charged for 100 GiB of the provisioned capacity.
• The disks are billed for any additional IOPS provisioned over the free baseline of 3,000 IOPS. In this case, since you provisioned 5,000 IOPS, you will be billed for the additional 2,000 IOPS.
• The disks are billed for any additional throughput over the free baseline throughput of 125 MBPS. In this case, since you provisioned 150 MBPS throughput, you will be billed for the additional 25 MBPS throughput.

You can learn more on the Azure Managed Disks pricing page.

Getting Started

Premium SSD v2 is currently available in select regions. You can request access to get started. Once enrolled, you will be able to create and manage Premium SSD v2 via the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI SDKs. You can refer to the Premium SSD v2 documentation to learn more.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Please email us at AzureDisks@microsoft.com with any questions.