Premium SSD Managed Disks
Premium SSD managed disks offer high-performance, low-latency block storage suitable for a wide range of I/O-intensive workloads, including production and development environments. They provide consistent and durable performance for your Azure virtual machines.
Key Features and Benefits
- High Performance: Offers up to 20,000 IOPS and 900 MB/s throughput per disk.
- Low Latency: Provides consistently low latencies for demanding applications.
- Durability: Built on Azure's resilient storage infrastructure with a 99.999% availability SLA.
- Scalability: Easily scale disk size and performance as your needs grow.
- Cost-Effectiveness: A balance between performance and cost for mission-critical applications.
Performance Tiers
Premium SSD disks come in various tiers, each offering different performance characteristics. The primary performance indicator is the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput (MB/s) the disk can sustain.
| Disk Size (GiB) | Max IOPS (Read/Write) | Max Throughput (MB/s) |
|---|---|---|
| 128 | 1,200 | 200 |
| 256 | 2,400 | 400 |
| 512 | 4,800 | 750 |
| 1,024 | 9,600 | 900 |
| 2,048 | 19,200 | 900 |
| 3,072 | 20,000 | 900 |
| 4,096 | 20,000 | 900 |
Note: Performance might be limited by the VM size and its network bandwidth.
Use Cases
- Enterprise Applications: SAP HANA, SQL Server, Oracle.
- High-Performance Databases: Relational and NoSQL databases.
- Boot Volumes: For Azure VMs requiring fast OS boot times.
- Application Tiers: Web servers and application servers needing low latency.
- Development and Test Environments: For applications that demand speed and responsiveness.
Creating a Premium SSD Managed Disk
You can create a Premium SSD managed disk using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or ARM templates.
Azure CLI Example:
az disk create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyPremiumSSDDisk --sku Premium_LRS --size-gb 128 --zone 1
PowerShell Example:
New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName "Premium_LRS" -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128 -Zone 1
New-AzDisk -DiskConfig $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName "MyResourceGroup" -DiskName "MyPremiumSSDDisk"
Considerations
- Cost: Premium SSDs are more expensive than Standard SSDs and HDDs due to their performance.
- Performance Bursting: While Premium SSDs offer consistent performance, consider Ultra Disks for ultra-high throughput and IOPS requirements that exceed Premium SSD capabilities.
- Availability Zones: For higher resilience, consider deploying disks in Availability Zones.
Important: Ensure your VM size supports the desired disk performance. Check Azure VM documentation for per-VM limits.