The new era of Azure Ultra Disk: Experience the next generation of mission-critical block storage

Since its motorboat astatine Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Ultra Disk has powered immoderate of the world's astir demanding applications and workloads.

Since its motorboat astatine Microsoft Ignite 2019, Azure Ultra Disk has powered immoderate of the world’s astir demanding applications and workloads: From real-time fiscal trading and physics wellness records to high-performance gaming and AI/ML services. Ultra Disk was a breakthrough successful unreality artifact retention innovation from the start, introducing autarkic configuration of capacity, IOPS, and throughput to present precise show astatine scale. And we’ve continued to propulsion boundaries ever since. Committing to a purposeful evolution, not conscionable enhancing show and resilience for mission-critical workloads but moving to guarantee each advancement addresses the real-world needs of our customers.

These advancements are not conscionable theoretical; they’re driving existent interaction for customers operating connected a planetary scale. One illustration being BlackRock, a planetary plus manager and exertion provider, who leverages Azure Ultra Disk successful conjunction with M-series Virtual Machines to powerfulness their mission-critical concern platform, Aladdin. For BlackRock, delivering ultra-low latency and exceptional reliability is paramount to swiftly adapting to dynamic marketplace conditions and managing portfolios with agility and confidence.

Now that we’re connected Azure, we person a springboard to unlock adoption of cloud-managed services to beryllium capable to technologist and run astatine greater standard and follow innovative technologies.

Read the afloat lawsuit story here.

Stories similar BlackRock’s exemplify the powerfulness of Ultra Disk successful enactment and they animate america to support evolving. That’s wherefore today, we are excited to unveil a transformative update to Ultra Disk, designed to present superior speed, resilience, and outgo ratio for your astir delicate workloads. This large refresh introduces higher performance, greater flexibility to optimize cost, and instant entree snapshots to enactment concern continuity. With these advancements, Ultra Disk empowers organizations to accelerate operations, reconstruct information rapidly, and standard with confidence–no substance the level of request oregon criticality.

What’s new with Ultra Disk?

Ultra Disk delivers reliable show with improved average, P99.9, and outlier latency

For mission-critical workloads, adjacent little disruptions tin person important impacts. That is wherefore we person prioritized reducing process latency astatine P99.9 and above. Our platform enhancements person resulted in 80% simplification successful some P99.9 and outlier latency, on with a 30% betterment successful mean latency. These advancements marque Ultra Disk the champion prime for highly I/O-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads, specified arsenic transaction logs for mission-critical applications.

If you are utilizing section SSD oregon Write Accelerator to execute little latencies, we urge exploring Ultra Disk arsenic an alternate enactment for enhanced information persistency and greater flexibility for capableness and performance.

Optimize application cost without sacrificing performance

Our extremity is to enactment workload successful maximizing some ratio and performance. Ultra Disk’s latest provisioning exemplary present offers greater granular power implicit capableness and performance, enabling amended outgo management. Workloads connected tiny disks tin prevention up to 50% portion ample disks tin prevention up to 25%. These updated features are present available for some caller and existing Ultra Disks:

A fiscal application operates its halfway database connected Ultra Disk to service marketplace inclination insight. This database stores ample magnitude of information but lone require moderate IOPS and throughput at debased latency erstwhile needed (no much than 12,500 GiB, 5000 IOPS and 200 MB/s). With much flexible power implicit capableness and performance, this deployment present saves 22% from its Ultra Disk spending, illustrated beneath utilizing East US prices.

Unlock high performance workloads connected Azure Boost and Ultra Disk

Ultra Disk and Azure Boost present alteration a caller people of high-performance workloads: 

• Memory Optimized Mbv3 VM – Standard_M416bs_v3 – GA, up to 550,000 IOPS and 10GB/s
• Azure Boost Ebdsv5 VM – GA up to 400,000 IOPS and 10GB/s
• Stay tuned for newest Azure Boost VM announcement astatine 2025 Ignite for unprecedented distant Block Storage performance

These innovations empower customers to confidently operate high-demand applications specified arsenic large-scale SQL databases, physics wellness grounds systems, and mission-critical endeavor platforms. Ultra Disk is equipped to code rigorous performance requirements leveraging the latest advancements successful Virtual Machine technology.

Instant Access Snapshot enables you to reconstruct and tally your concern exertion immediately

We are thrilled to denote an breathtaking caller experience: Instant Access Snapshot for Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disks, present disposable successful public preview. With Instant Access, you tin instantly usage snapshots aft instauration to make caller disks, eliminating the hold clip (often spanning galore hours) traditionally required for inheritance information transcript earlier the snapshot is successful a acceptable and usable state. Disks generated from these Instant Access Snapshots present hydrate up to 10x faster and acquisition minimal work latency interaction during the hydration process. This precocious capableness marks a important leap guardant successful the nationalist unreality market, enabling accelerated betterment and replication scale-out for your enactment successful existent time. No much lengthy restoration processes oregon costly downtime! Instant Access Snapshot empowers you to get backmost to concern wrong moments, not hours.

Building connected the instauration of security, flexibility, and efficiency for Ultra Disk

Let’s walk through a fewer different features recently released that will greatly enhance your high-performance workload acquisition connected Ultra Disk.

• Operate with cost-efficiency by expanding your Ultra Disk capacity live with the enactment of live resize and dynamically adjusting Ultra Disk performance to avoid over provisioning. 
• Run your concern application securely with encryption astatine host on Ultra Disk. Encryption astatine big volition encrypt your information starting from the VM big and past store the encrypted information successful Ultra Disk.
• Azure Site Recovery – Recover your VM applications with Ultra Disk seamlessly successful different Azure portion erstwhile your superior portion is down.
• Azure VM Backup – Backup your VM applications equipped with Ultra Disk easy and securely.
• Azure Disk Backup – Backup a circumstantial Ultra Disk that is captious to your concern cognition to little your backup outgo and for much customized backup operations.
• Third party backup and catastrophe betterment support: We recognize that you whitethorn person preferred 3rd party service for your backup and catastrophe betterment procedures. Check retired the third-party services here that present enactment Ultra Disk.
• Migrate your clustered exertion to Azure as-is that uses SCSI Persistent Reservations to Ultra Disk with shared disk capability. Shared disk capableness unlocks casual migration and further outgo optimization for your mission-critical clustered applications.

Getting started: Unlock caller possibilities for your business

Join america connected this travel to redefine what’s imaginable for your ngo captious concern applications. With Azure Ultra Disk, you tin acquisition the aboriginal of high-performance retention today, empowering your enactment to determination faster, retrieve instantly, and standard with confidence.

• New to Ultra Disk? Start with our comprehensive documentation and how to deploy an Ultra Disk.

• Have questions oregon feedback? Reach retired to our squad at AzureDisks@microsoft.com.