We are excited to announce the preview of Premium SSD v2, the next generation of Microsoft Azure Premium SSD Disk Storage. This new disk offering provides the most advanced block storage solution designed for a broad range of input/output (IO)-intensive enterprise production workloads that require sub-millisecond disk latencies as well as high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput—at a low cost. With Premium SSD v2, you can now provision up to 64TiBs of storage capacity, 80,000 IOPS, and 1,200 MBPS throughput on a single disk. With best-in-class IOPS and bandwidth, Premium SSD v2 provides the most flexible and scalable general-purpose block storage in the cloud, enabling you to meet the ever-growing demands of your production workloads such as—SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, Mongo DB, big data, analytics, gaming, on virtual machines, or stateful containers. Moreover, with Premium SSD v2, you can provision granular disk sizes, IOPS, and throughput independently based on your workload needs, providing you more flexibility in managing performance and costs.

With the launch of Premium SSD v2, our Azure Disk Storage portfolio now includes one of the most comprehensive sets of disk storage offerings to satisfy workloads ranging from Tier-1 IOPS intensive workloads such as SAP HANA to general purpose workloads such as RDMS and NoSQL databases and cost-sensitive Dev/Test workloads.

Benefits of Premium SSD v2

As customers transition their production workloads to the cloud or deploy new cloud-native applications, balancing performance and cost is top of mind. For example, transaction-intensive database workloads may require high IOPS on a small disk size or a gaming application may need very high IOPS during peak hours. Similarly, big data applications like Cloudera/Hadoop may require very high throughput at a low cost. Hence, customers need the flexibility to scale their IOPS and throughput independent of the disk size. With Premium SSD v2, you can customize disk performance to precisely meet your workload requirements or seasonal demands, without the need to provision additional storage capacity.

Premium SSD v2 also enables you to provision storage capacity ranging from 1 GiB up to 64 TiB with GiB increments. All Premium SSD v2 disks provide a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/sec. If your disk requires higher performance, you can provision the required IOPS and throughput at a low cost, up to the max limits shown below. You can dynamically scale up or scale down the IOPS and throughput as needed without downtime, allowing you to manage disk performance cost-effectively while avoiding the maintenance overhead of striping multiple disks to achieve more performance. Summarizing the key benefits:

• Granular disk size in 1 GiB increments.
• Independent provisioning of IOPS, throughput, and GiB.
• Consistent sub-millisecond latency.
• Easier maintenance with scaling performance up and down without downtime.

Premium SSD v2, like all other Azure Disk Storage offerings, will provide our industry-leading data durability and high availability at general availability.

Following is a summary comparing Premium SSD v2 with the current Premium SSD and Ultra Disk.

Supported Azure Virtual Machines

Premium SSD v2 can be used with any premium storage-enabled virtual machines sizes enabling you to leverage a diverse set of virtual machine sizes. Currently, Premium SSD v2 can only be used as data disks. Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs can be used as OS disks for virtual machines using Premium SSD v2 data disks.

Pricing

Premium SSD v2 disks are billed hourly based on the provisioned capacity, IOPS, and MBPS. Let’s take an example of a disk that you provision with 100 GiB capacity, 5000 IOPS, and 150 MB/sec throughput.

• The disks are billed per GiB of the provisioned capacity. Hence, you will be charged for 100 GiB of the provisioned capacity.
• The disks are billed for any additional IOPS provisioned over the free baseline of 3,000 IOPS. In this case, since you provisioned 5000 IOPS, you will be billed for the additional 2,000 IOPS.
• The disks are billed for any additional throughput over the free baseline throughput of 125 MB/s. In this case, since you provisioned 150 MB/sec throughput, you will be billed for the additional 25 MB/s throughput.

You can learn more on the Azure Managed Disks pricing page.

Getting Started

Premium SSD v2 is currently available in preview in select regions. If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can request access to get started. Once enrolled in the preview program, you will be able to create and manage Premium SSD v2 via the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI SDKs. You can refer to the Premium SSD v2 documentation to learn more.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Please email us at AzureDisks@microsoft.com with any questions.