What's new in Azure Disk Storage at Microsoft Ignite 2020
Published Sep 22 2020 09:45 AM 3,853 Views
Microsoft

As our customers are accelerating their move to the cloud to save costs, improve flexibility and scalability, and enhance security, we are committed to delivering innovations in Azure Disk Storage to help them more easily migrate and run their business-critical applications on Azure.

At Microsoft Ignite 2020, we are excited to announce several new important enhancements to Azure Disk Storage in the areas of security, scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

 

Broader regional availability for Azure shared disks

Shared disks on Ultra Disks is now available in all regions that support Ultra Disks. Shared disks on Premium SSD is now available in 19 regions with rollout coming up at the end of September.

With shared disks, Azure Disk Storage is the only shared block storage in the cloud that supports both Windows and Linux-based clustered or high-availability applications. Shared disks allows a single disk to be attached to multiple virtual machines, enabling customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in the cloud like clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications, without compromising on well-known deployment patterns for fast failover and high availability.

Watch this deep dive video to learn more running clustered applications on Azure with shared disks.

 

Additional resources to learn more about shared disks:

Read the Azure shared disks GA blog announcement

Read the SQL FCI with Azure shared disks blog

Azured shared disks support for SAP SCS/SCS:

 

512E sector size support on Azure Ultra Disks is now generally available

Azure Ultra Disks enables the lift and shift of business-critical applications that require high throughput, high IOPS, and sub-millisecond latency. With the support of 512E, you can now migrate legacy databases that depend on 512 bytes sector sizes, such as older versions of Oracle Database or Sybase with 2K page files, as-is to Azure.

 

You will need to request access to this feature here.

 

Azure Disk Storage integration with Azure Private Link is now generally available

You can use time-bound shared access signature (SAS) URIs to Managed Disks and snapshots for exporting data to other regions for regional expansion, disaster recovery, and forensic analysis. You can also use a SAS URI to securely directly upload virtual hard disks (VHD) from on-premises to an Azure Managed Disk. Now, you can leverage the integration with Azure Private Link for enhanced security to allow data on your disks to only be exported and imported over your private virtual network.

 

Get started today.

 

Watch this deep dive video to learn more about Private Link integration and other security features for Azure Disk Storage.

 

Performance tiers for Premium SSDs now in public preview

For an event like Black Friday, performance testing, running a training environment, you may need to achieve consistently higher performance for a few days or hours and then return to the normal performance levels. On Premium SSDs, you now have the flexibility to easily increase the disk performance by selecting a higher performance tier without increasing the disk size. You can also change tiers at any time or bring it back to your baseline performance tier, allowing you to match workload performance needs and reduce costs.

 

A baseline performance tier is set based on your provisioned disk size. You can set a higher performance tier when your application requires this to meet higher demand without increasing the size. For example, if you provision a P10 disk (128 GB), your baseline performance tier is set as P10 (500 IOPS and 100 MB/s). You can update the tier to match the performance of P50 (7500 IOPS and 250 MB/s) without increasing the disk size.. 

 

Learn more.

 

Virtual machine bursting is now supported on Dsv3 and Esv3-series

Back in May, we launched virtual machine bursting on all Lsv2-series VMs. We are now enabling this feature for VMs in the . Bursting allows your virtual machine to burst its disk IO and MiB/s throughput performance for up to 30 minutes in a day - offering you a more cost-efficient solution, as you can provision your virtual machine based on their average disk IO performance instead of peak performance. This allows your VM to handle unforeseen spiky disk traffic smoothly and process batched jobs with speed. There is no additional cost associated with this new feature or adjustments on the VM pricing and it comes enabled by default.

Some example scenarios where bursting can come into save the day:

  • Improving boot times  - With your virtual machine and your disks both being able to burst and coming fully stocked with bursting credits at the start, your instance will be able to boot at a much faster rate than before.
  • Handling batch jobs – Some application’s workloads are cyclical in nature and require a baseline performance for most of the time and require higher performance for a short period of time. For instance, an accounting program that process transactions daily that require a small amount of disk traffic but then does reconciling month end reports which then needs a higher amount of disk traffic. 
  • Preparedness for traffic spikes – Web servers and their applications can get a surge of traffic from unforeseen circumstances. With bursting virtual machines and disks backing the web servers, the web servers will handle traffic spikes smoothly and improve their customer’s experience by reducing load times under heavy stress.  

Watch this deep dive video to learn more how to leverage bursting and understand disk IO.

 

Azure Disk Storage at Microsoft Ignite 2020

Check out Azure Disk Storage at Microsoft Ignite 2020 - learn more about the latest updates, connect with experts, and more! Register for Microsoft Ignite.

 

Digital Breakout

  • Unlock cost savings and maximize value with Azure Infrastructure – Erin Chapple, CVP, Azure Compute

Session times:

 

Pre-recorded session for On Demand:

 

Ask-the-expert (AtE) sessions:

 

Expert connections (post-Ignite)

 

Join Microsoft engineering teams and your peers after Ignite to take part in meaningful conversations about the tools you use every day. Share insights, discover new perspectives, and problem-solve in a collaborative environment to shape the future of Microsoft products. Sign-up here.

 

Check out these sessions related to Azure Disk Storage:

 

Windows and Linux Cluster Migrations Including SQL FCI

Customers are increasingly looking to migrate their primary storage environments running clustered applications from on-premises to the cloud. We'd like to learn more about common clustered configurations on-premises and the migration experience expected by customers as they move their workloads to Azure.

 

Stateful Container Application Migrations

Customers are increasingly moving to stateful container applications leveraging storage. These environments are prevalent both on-premises and other cloud environments running at production scale. Containers offer the promise of mobility but require careful planning when in state so we'd like to learn more about the migration experience expected by customers for stateful applications moving to Azure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last update:
‎Sep 23 2020 01:26 PM
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