Azure Premium Storage reaches General Availability, a key to Microsoft Dynamics AX cloud story

Microsoft announced today that Azure Premium Storage has reached general availability status. Premium Storage is a solid-state drive (SSD)-based storage offering designed to support I/O-intensive workloads - like those of Dynamics AX.

Here are some details from the Microsoft Server and Cloud Blog:

"Premium Storage is currently available for use in the West US, East US 2, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan West regions. With general availability, Premium Storage will now carry a service-level agreement (SLA) for 99.9 percent availability. General availability pricing will be in effect on June 1, 2015.

With Premium Storage, you can add up to 32 TB of persistent storage per virtual machine (VM), with more than 50,000 IOPS per VM with extremely low latencies for read operations."

General availability of Premium Storage was one of the final things that the Dynamics AX team needed before it was able to really promote AX in production scenarios on Azure.

"We recommend [Dynamics AX] production systems to run with premium storage," Dynamics ERP general manager Christian Pedersen told us at Convergence 2015. "Without guaranteed IO, you can run perfectly fine but in peak times you can hit bottlenecks, and that is what impacts performance and the experience. So we really recommend production environments to be running with premium storage."

Microsoft Business Solutions CMO Wayne Morris writes that "these new capabilities ... help us stay true to our commitment to customers and partners to increase their deployment options and shift to the cloud. " 

Microsoft is already working to highlight the growing number of customers going live with Dynamics ERP solutions in Azure. In March, Microsoft ...