Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Azure Premium Storage

Before Christmas, Microsoft added a bunch of new features to Azure. One that I've only really just noticed was Premium Storage. Azure provides several types of cloud storage (blogs, queues, tables and files) – with the files storage still in preview. Premium storage too is in Preview.

The basic idea if Azure Storage is that you can store your data in the cloud: whether that data is the VHD drive for an Azure VM, a message queue used to hook up different parts of an application, or whatever. Azure storage is a fundamental building block you use to create cloud computing systems based on Azure.

The new premium storage feature now allows you to store this data on SSD disks. This new storage option provides higher performance and lower disk latency. Not only that, but, at least during the preview, Microsoft offered three types of SSD: P10, P20, and P30. These disks are 128gb, 512gb and 1tb respectively. The bigger disk provide more IOPS and greater throughput.

I look forward to playing a bit more with Premium Storage! I suppose it goes without saying: you can easily use Azure PowerShell cmdlets to manage this storage. I hope to generate a few scripts to demonstrate this!

For more details on Azure Storage, See Sirius Kuttiyan's recent blog post. For fuller details on Azure Storage pricing, see: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/. Premium storage is still in preview, and is offered at a bit of a discount. The 128GB  P10 disk, for example, is £5.47/month, while the 1TB P30 is £37.54/month.

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