Using Azure Premium Storage

Q. How can I create a Premium Storage storage account?

A. Premium Storage is a new type of storage available in Azure which is SSD based and offers the following key capabilities:

Higher IOPS per disk.
Predictable performance. Where as regular storage may have a 500 IOPS maximum you may not actually get this performance. A disk created on Premium Storage should receive the IOPS associated with the disk type.
Like regular Azure storage 3 copies of the data are stored within the datacenter.

At time of writing Premium Storage is only available in certain Azure regions and these are documented at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/ and currently includes West US, East US 2, West Europe, Southeast Asia and Japan West but I would expect this to expand over time.

More information on Premium Storage can be found at:

To create a new premium storage account perform the following:

Login to the Preview Portal at https://portal.azure.com
Select New - Data + Storage - Storage
Enter the name of the storage account and select Location. Select a location that supports Premium Storage, e.g. East US 2
Select Pricing Tier
Select View all
Select Premium Locally Redundant then click Select
Continue with the storage account creation

VHDs created in Premium Storage will be one of three types that each have their own predictable performance characteristics and size. These are documented in the links previously mentioned but are summarized below.

Disk Types	P10	P20	P30
Disk Size	128 GB	512 GB	1024 GB
IOPS per Disk	500	2300	5000
Throughput per Disk	100 MB/sec	150 MB/sec	200 MB/sec

You do not specify a disk type, the disk type is chosen based on the size of disk you create and rounder up to the applicable disk type. Therefore any disk 128 GB or smaller will be a P10, any disk between 129 and 512 will be a P20 and any disk over 512 will be a P30.

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