microsoft logoMicrosoft announced today that Azure Premium Storage, a service providing high-performance data storage for users of its Azure cloud platform, has reached general availability after first launching as a preview last year.

The service is built for users who need high-speed storage in a variety of applications including SQL Server, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. Customers can select up to 32 terabytes of solid state drive-based storage per virtual machine they have running in Microsoft’s cloud. The service supports up to 64,000 input output operations per second at low-millisecond latency for read operations, up from the 50,000 IOPS Microsoft offered in preview.

Corey Sanders, a partner director of program management at Microsoft, told GeekWire in an interview that the performance bump means that Azure offers the most IOPS of any public cloud provider right now. All of that is powered by a “Blobcache” system that combines the reliability of redundant, persistent storage systems and the speed of local drives.

“Typically, for customers when they come in and use storage on the public cloud, they have to make this decision between using persistent storage, or using those local SSDs that are attached to the virtual machine itself,” Sanders said. “With our new Azure Premium Storage offering, we now allow customers to use both.”

One of Premium Storage’s existing clients is educational gaming company JumpStart, which uses the service to both power SQL Server databases for titles like “School of Dragons” and run backups of those games simultaneously. Michael Boldezar, the company’s vice president of platform technology, was quoted in a blog post announcing today’s availability that using Azure Premium Storage allowed the company’s workloads to run two times faster than they did before.

With today’s announcement, users can also access Premium Storage in new availability regions. Now, people have access to the service through Azure’s East China, Southeast Asia and West Japan regions in addition to West US, East US 2 and West Europe.

Using Premium Storage will cost a pretty penny, though: the service’s prices doubled with the shift to general availability today.

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