Today we are happy to announce another price reduction for Windows Azure Storage by as much as 28%, effective on December 12^th.  This follows our March 8^th 2012 reduction of 12% furthering our commitment to best overall value in the industry.

Reducing prices is only part of the story; we’ve also added more value to our storage offerings in a number of ways. Our Geo Redundant Storage continues to lead the market in durability with more than 400 miles of separation between replicas.  We recently announced deployment of a flat network for Windows Azure across all of our datacenters to provide very high bandwidth network connectivity for storage clients which significantly enhances scenarios like MapReduce, HPC, and others. We also announced increased scalability targets for Windows Azure Storage and continue to invest in improving bandwidth between compute and storage.

Our continued commitment to reduce costs and increase capabilities seem to be resonating with our customers based on tremendous growth we are seeing. We have over 4 trillion objects stored, an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, and a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Windows Azure Storage accounts have geo-replication on by default to provide the greatest durability. Customers can turn geo-replication off to use what we call Locally Redundant Storage, which results in a discounted price relative to Geo Redundant. You can find more information on Geo Redundant Storage and Locally Redundant Storage here.

Here is the detailed information on new, reduced pricing for both Geo and Locally redundant storage (prices below are per GB per month):

In addition to low cost storage, we continue to offer a variety of options for developers to use Windows Azure for free or at significantly reduced prices. To name a few examples:

• We offer a free 90 day trial for new users
• We have great offers for MSDN customers, Microsoft partner network members and startups that provide free usage every month up to $300 per month in value
• We have monthly commitment plans that can save you up to 32% on everything you use on Windows Azure

Find out more about Windows Azure pricing and offers, and sign up to get started. 

I look forward to your comments and feedback below.

Sincerely,

Steven Martin
General Manager
Windows Azure Business Planning