Microsoft Ignite 2022: What’s new and what’s next in Azure Disk Storage

Microsoft Ignite 2022: What’s new and what’s next in Azure Disk Storage

Azure Disk Storage provides highly scalable and reliable block storage for mission-critical workloads. We offer industry-leading durability of 99.999999999% (11’ 9s) with a zero historical annualized failure rate, as well as industry-leading single instance VM availability SLAs for Standard SSD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disks. Our unique offers also include Shared Disks with Zone Redundant Storage and simplified migration and disaster recovery processes using a powerful set of REST APIs.

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk

In July 2022, we launched a preview of Premium SSD v2 disks, the most advanced general purpose block storage solution designed for performance-critical workloads. Many Azure customers have tried it in preview and helped validate the benefits of the new offering. We are now making Premium SSD v2 generally available in select regions.

Premium SSD v2 Disks are ideal for applications that need sub-millisecond disk latencies along with high IOPS and throughput. They can support a broad range of IO-intensive enterprise production workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, Mongo DB, big data/analytics on virtual machines or stateful containers.

With Premium SSD v2, Azure customers can provision up to 64TiBs of storage capacity, 1200 MBPS throughput, and 80,000 IOPS on a single disk. Also, the capacity and performance can be separately configured to meet the workload requirements, giving you greater flexibility to manage cost and performance.

Head to the Premium SSD v2 blog to learn more and get started.

Azure Elastic SAN (Preview)

Azure Elastic SAN is a unique cloud-native and fully managed Storage Area Network service. The service is an industry first and is being offered in preview today.

Elastic SAN offers a high-performance, cost-effective, scalable, and highly available storage solution that can connect to a variety of Azure compute services. Its consolidated storage experience makes volume management easier by grouping volumes and enabling configurations settings at the group level.

This new service enables bulk provisioning of block storage to achieve massive scale, up to millions of IOPS, double-digit GBPS throughput, and low single-digit millisecond latencies while serving a broad range of workloads.

Resiliency is built-in, with zone redundant storage for high availability when running business-critical applications. Elastic SAN provides an end-to-end experience like the on-premises SAN environments you are familiar with. And, unlike your on-prem environments, you can dynamically scale up capacity and performance on the fly without the wait for new hardware.

Refer to Azure Elastic SAN blog to learn more and get started.

Encrypt Managed Disks with Cross-tenant Customer-Managed Keys (Preview)

Protect your data by encrypting managed disks with cross tenant customer-managed keys (CMK).

This capability, now in preview, enables customers to have more control over their CMK and their data even when using Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions in Azure. Many SaaS providers in Azure want to give customers the choice to control and manage their own encryption keys.

Customers can now use cross-tenant CMKs to manage encryption keys in their own Azure AD tenant and subscription using Azure Key Vault.

Get started by reviewing our documentation.

Live resize Premium and Standard Disks

Resizing a disk on Azure can provide more storage capacity and better performance for your applications. We are now making live resize for Premium SSD, Standard SSD and Standard HDD Disk Storage generally available.

With live resize, you can dynamically increase the storage capacity of your disks without any disruption to your applications. To optimize costs, you can start with smaller disks and increase the storage capacity only when needed without experiencing any downtime.

To learn more, read the documentation.

Virtual Machine storage bursting metrics

To learn more, read the documentation.