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Cost saving with Standard SSD Billing Caps

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Cost saving with Standard SSD Billing Caps

As part of our commitment to continuously delivering increased value for our Azure Disk Storage customers, we are excited to introduce a cap on the number of billable Azure Standard SSD transactions. As a result, we have made changes to the billable transaction costs per hour that can result in additional cost savings.   

 

The total cost of Azure Standard SSD Disk Storage depends on the size, number of disks, and the number of transactions. The number of transactions a disk can execute/perform/process is unchanged, so your disk will work as it always has been. However, the cost associated with these transactions is now limited and can help avoid greater costs.  

 

The table below contains the maximum number of billable transactions for Standard SSD Disk Storage: 

 

Product 

LRS Transaction Cap (# of Trx / hr) 

ZRS Transaction Cap (# of Trx / hr) 

E1 

6,800 

7,800 

E2 

13,400 

15,400 

E3 

26,600 

30,600 

E4 

43,400 

61,000 

E6 

81,200 

114,400 

E10 

147,200 

214,000 

E15 

274,000 

398,400 

E20 

502,000 

737,600 

E30 

829,200 

1,238,800 

E40 

893,000 

1,344,700 

E50 

1,578,400 

2,405,600 

E60 

2,777,500 

4,243,900 

E70 

4,379,300 

7,353,100 

E80 

9,478,400 

14,706,200 

 

If the number of hourly transactions listed on the table is reached, you will not incur additional transaction costs. The new pricing is effective March 6th, 2023 and applies to all the regions where Standard SSD is currently available.   

 

Let’s review a few important details associated with this announcement.  

Transactions on Azure Disks 

On Azure, input/output operation per second (IOPS) and transactions are similar with one major exception: 

 

A transaction on Azure is an I/O operation less than or equal to 256 KiBs of throughput. If your IO operation is larger than 256 KiBs of throughput, it is considered to require multiple transactions. The number of transactions is calculated by dividing the I/O size by 256 KiBs.  

 

For example, an IO with the size of 1024 KiBs (1MiB) would be processed as 4 transactions on a Standard SSD disk. 

 

Example of billed transaction caps 

Let's look at an example to see how the new billing cap can help you save money. If you’re using an E4 disk with a block size of 4KiBs that averages 100 IOPS per month. With this block size 1 IO equals 1 transaction.  

 

Previously without the transaction cap, the 100 transactions/second would have resulted in the following billable transactions: 

 

100 transactions/sec * 60 seconds * 60 minutes/hour = 360,000 Billable transactions
 
That would have resulted in the hourly cost shown below: 
 
360,000 billable transactions $0.002/10,000 Transactions=$0.072 per hour
 
And having that cost over a month would be:
 
.072*730 hours/month = $52.56 per month
 

Therefore, without this newly announced transaction cap, you would have been billed around $52 per month for an E4 SSD disk performing an average of 100 IOPS (transactions) for the transaction activity.  

 

Now with the E4 disks having an hourly billable transaction cap of 43,400 transactions in an hour, your hourly bill with a Disk running at 100 IOPs would be: 

 

43,400 billable transactions $0.002/10,000 Transactions=$0.0087 per hour
 
And having that cost over a month would be: 

 
$.0087730 hours/month=$6.33 per month
 
And your monthly billing statement would add up to a grand total of $6.33. That’s an 88% reduction in transaction costs based on this example. 
 
Standard HDD Comparison 

Following the same example, let’s evaluate the cost of Standard HDD, which is cheaper per transaction than Standard SSD but does not have a cap on billable transactions: 

 

360,000 billable transactions∗ $0.0005/10,000 Transactions∗ 730 hours/month=$13.31 per month

 

Your monthly Standard HDD transaction bill would add up to $13.31. That’s more than double the transaction bill would have been with cost you would incur by deploying a Standard SSD disk of the same capacity.  

 

Standard SSD Benefits

In addition to the potential cost savings, upgrading from Standard HDD to Standard SSD has the following advantages: 

  • Increased service-level availability (SLA) of single-instance VM connectivity from 95 percent to 99.5 percent, improving availability guarantees. 
  • Reduced latency by 2X, making data retrieval faster while increasing application performance. 
  • Improved consistency of performance in terms of input/output operations and throughput, making your applications run more smoothly. 
 
Learn more
For more information about Azure Disks, please check out our documentation. If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].  

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