Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Microsoft Azure Ultra Disk Storage—a new Managed Disks offering that delivers unprecedented and extremely scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency for the most demanding Azure Virtual Machines and container workloads. With Ultra Disk Storage, customers are now able to lift-and-shift mission critical enterprise applications to the cloud including applications like SAP HANA, top tier SQL databases such as SQL Server, Oracle DB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra. With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure now offers four types of persistent disks—Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. This portfolio gives our customers a comprehensive set of disk offerings for every workload.

Ultra Disk Storage is designed to provide customers with extreme flexibility when choosing the right performance characteristics for their workloads. Customers can now have granular control on the size, IOPS, and bandwidth of Ultra Disk Storage to meet their specific performance requirements. Organizations can achieve the maximum I/O limit of a virtual machine (VM) with Ultra Disk Storage without having to stripe multiple disks. Check out the blog post “Azure Ultra Disk Storage: Microsoft's service for your most I/O demanding workloads” from Azure’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Russinovich, for a deep under-the-hood view.

Since we launched the preview for Ultra Disk Storage last September, our customers have used this capability on Azure on a wide range of workloads and have achieved new levels of performance and scale on the public cloud to maximize their virtual machine performance.

Below are some quotes from customers in our preview program:

“Ultra Disk Storage enabled SEGA to seamlessly migrate from our on-premise datacenter to Azure and take advantage of flexible performance controls.”

– Takaya Segawa, General Manager/Creative Officer, SEGA

“Ultra Disk Storage allows us to achieve incredible write performance for our most demanding PostgreSQL database workloads - giving us the ability to scale our applications in Azure.”

– Andrew Tindula, Senior IT Manager, Online Trading Academy

Ultra Disk Storage performance characteristics

Ultra Disk Storage offers sizes ranging from 4 GiB up to 64 TiB with granular increments. In addition, it is possible to dynamically configure and scale the IOPS and bandwidth on the disk independent of capacity.

Customers can now maximize disk performance by leveraging:

Up to 300 IOPS per GiB, to a maximum of 160K IOPS per disk

Up to a maximum of 2000 MBps per disk

Pricing and availability

Ultra Disk is now available in multiple regions. Please refer to the documentation for the latest on supported regions. For pricing details for Ultra Disk, please refer to the pricing page.

Get started with Azure Ultra Disk Storage

Refer to the instructions to get started with Ultra using the portal, ARM, or SDKs.