1

There is some marketing-speak suggesting that it may be possible ..:

http://gigaom.com/2012/06/05/new-windows-azure-goes-all-ssd-to-one-up-amazon-in-the-cloud/

.. but I couldn't find any way to actually do it using control panel.


More specifically, I'd like to improve random read/write performance.

Random read/write benchmark (4K and 4K/QD32 rows) are shown on the screenshot below:

azure_windows_2012_r2 disk benchmark


(update #1)

From: https://aws.amazon.com/windows/

There's such instance as:

m3.xlarge .. 15GiB RAM .. 2 x 40 SSD .. $0.702 per Hour

So to make my question more specific: is there any equivalent for such instance on Azure?


(update #2)

I ended up using ..: A7 .. 56 GB RAM .. $1.60 per Hour

.. and creating RamDisk using "ImDisk Toolkit": http://reboot.pro/files/file/284-imdisk-toolkit/

This got me random read/write performance close to what I wanted: azure ramdisk performance

But this was way too much effort and I had to accept "NO" as an answer.

2 Answers 2

4

You can see all of the current Azure VM configurations here. There's no in-chassis SSD configuration available amongst the listed VM sizings.

EDIT Oct 2015 This answer was originally posted prior to SSDs being offered. Today, both in-chassis SSD and SSD attached disks (durable, Premium Storage) are available. Both D- and G-series VMs offer in-chassis SSDs (non-durable).

With the DS- and GS- VMs, these also have in-chassis SSD, but also allow for attached SSD of 128GB, 512GB, and 1TB sizes, with differing IOPS and throughput for each. Maximum two disks per core (the largest, GS5, offering 32 cores, or maximum 64 1TB attached SSD's).

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  • 1
    Just a quick note: Microsoft has announced a new instance serie called D, which has SSD disks. You can read about them in the same link David posted above.
    – René
    Sep 25, 2014 at 15:15
0

What I've seen done to improve read/write performance throughput is to create a striped disk from several VHDs. My understanding is the block storage behind the network attached storage is SSD based.

1
  • We're using 4 striped disks for each of the nodes in our mongodb replica set, and migrating our ms-sql instance to do the same.
    – Tracker1
    Aug 13, 2014 at 22:22

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