Microsoft unveils new Azure disk sizes

Four, eight, and 16 GiB disk sizes have been made generally available on both Premium and Standard SSDs

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Microsoft has made new Azure disk sizes generally available, including four, eight, and 16 gibibytes (GiB) on both Premium and Standard SSDs, as well as bursting support on Azure Premium SSD Disks.

“To provide the best performance and cost balance for your production workloads, we are making significant improvements to our portfolio of Azure Premium SSD disks,” Azure storage program manager, Yuemin Lu said. 

According to Lu, with bursting, even the smallest Premium SSD disks (4 GiB) can now achieve up to 3,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 170 mebibytes (MiB)/second.

Disk bursting is offered on a credit-based system in which, Lu explains, users accumulate credits when traffic is below the provisioned target and they consume credit when traffic exceeds it. 

According to Lu, it can be best leveraged for operating system disks to accelerate virtual machine (VM) boot or data disks to accommodate spiky traffic.

“Disk bursting will be enabled by default for all new deployments of burst eligible disks with no user action required,” Lu said.

“For any existing Premium SSD Managed Disks (less than or equal to 512GiB/P20), whenever your disk is reattached or VM is restarted, disk bursting will start to take effect and your workloads can then experience a boost on disk performance.”

The performance target for all Standard SSD disks less than 64GiB (E6) has also been increased to 500 IOPS. 

“It is an ideal replacement of HDD based disk storage from either on-premises or cloud. It is best suited for hosting web servers, business applications that are not IO intensive but require stable and predictable performance for your business operations,” Lu said. 

IDG News Service

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