- Hi, all. Welcome to Azure Storage Day.
This is our session on Block Storage.
My name is Sirius Kuttiyan.
I'm a the Principal Program Manager on Azure Storage.
So in this session, I'll go over
how Azure Disk can help address a broad range
of your workload needs on the cloud.
I will also talk about our latest innovations
and show a couple of cool demos.
Why is block storage important?
As more and more organizations
migrate their critical workloads to the cloud,
the range of infrastructure requirements,
such as performance, durability, and scalability
is also growing.
Many of these requirements
tie directly to the block storage,
which is the foundation for running
these machine-critical applications.
The type of block storage, or disks,
that you select and configure
can impact your workload.
Over-provisioning can lead to higher costs
where you're paying for resources that you may not need.
Under-provisioning, can impact your application performance
and may lead to poor user experience.
So in a way, any type of suboptimal configurations
can impact your cost and performance.
So block storage is a key part of infrastructure
and you may need a range of block storage solutions
for running a variety of applications in the cloud.
It is also important to make the right storage decision
upfront in your cloud journey.
Why Azure Disks? Azure Disks are designed to be
the most durable, high-performing block storage
for virtual machines running machine-critical workloads.
I want to highlight a few, key reasons why you should choose
Azure Disk Storage.
First, Azure Disks provide a range of options
for cost-effective storage.
For example, we offer the lowest cost SSD disks
in the public cloud - with standard SSD.
We also offer capabilities like bursting
and performance tiers to optimize costs.
I will talk about some of those brand new capabilities
later in the session.
In terms of reliability, we have consistently delivered
industry-leading durability
with literally 0% annual failure rate,
which means we now have our longest customer data.
We also offer the highest single instance
VM SLA in the industry.
Three ninths SLA for VMs using Ultra Disk
and premium SSD disks.
For scalability with Ultra Disk,
you can get up to 160,000 I/Os and 2000 Mb per second
throughput along with sub-millisecond latency
for your most demanding workloads.
You can also dynamically scale the performance up and down
with Ultra Disks.
And for security, we offer built-in encryption options
to protect your data, including
encryption at rest, encryption in transit,
and even a double encryption for enhanced security.
We also offer PrivateLink integration for secure export
and import of your data.
On top of these, Azure Disks also provide
a unique REST API support, which enables ISP's
and customers to build truly advanced experience on Azure
for scenarios like backup, DR and migration.
It is the really differentiated experience
that you cannot get on other cloud platforms.
As I was saying, Azure Disk can be used for a wide range
of use cases and scenarios.
If your workload falls into any of these categories on here,
you can find the right solution on Azure.
For example, for your most IO intensive workloads,
Ultra Disk would be the right solution.
And for most other, generic enterprise production workloads,
you could use premium disks.
And for clustered applications like SQL FCI,
you can leverage our share disks,
which come with full support for clustering.
Now, I want to share a couple of examples
of how customers are using Azure Disk Storage,
for running their critical workloads.
One customer is SEGA. They are a video game developer.
They used Azure to expand their popular
online multiplayer game called Fantasy Star Online 2,
to North America.
They are hosting a game server on Azure, using Ultra Disks,
to ensure a seamless gaming experience for their users.
For them, it is critical to have low latency for storage
and the ability to dynamically scale performance,
based on the number of players.
With Ultra Disk as the foundation for their game,
SEGA successfully launched their game in North America
and it's now available in over 30 countries.
Another customer example is Pearson.
They are a global computer-based testing company
that delivers certification and licensing exams
to professions like nurses, doctors and IT practitioners
looking to get credentials to advance in their careers.
Pearson hosts this solution on Azure,
to remotely deliver exams for their clients.
They leverage the performance and flexibility
of premium SSD disks.
With Azure Disks as a foundation for their
critical application, Pearson was able to successfully meet
all their contractual obligations to their clients,
even as they shifted delivering exams remotely.
Azure Disk Storage offers a comprehensive set of
block storage solutions for every workload,
with a wide range of sizes, price points,
and performance characteristics, So you can get
the exact storage solution you need.
For your most IO intensive and demanding workloads
like SAP HANA, Ultra Disk delivers the best performance
and offers the unique ability to configure capacity IOPS
and throughput independently, and dynamically scale
performance up and down, so you can get
the optimal performance and costs for your needs.
Premium SSD's give you the best balance
of cost and performance, and is ideal for the majority
of your enterprise production workloads.
It is also the default choice on Azure.
For your other workloads that need consistent performance,
but is not as IO intensive, We offer standard SSDs
as a cost-effective option.
It's ideal for workloads like web servers.
And for low-cost storage,
for things like backup or test development,
we offer standard Hard Disk.
Now I want to share with you some of
the latest Azure Disk innovations.
First, I want to highlight the performance-scaling
capabilities that Azure Disk offers that may enable you
to scale your performance cost-effectively.
For unplanned scenarios where you need
high performance for a short period of time,
we currently offer two bursting capabilities.
Credit-based bursting for smaller disk
and virtual machine bursting.
Both are suitable for scenarios like
improving boot times, processing small-batch jobs,
and handling unexpected traffic spikes.
This is available at no additional costs
and it's based on a credit system
where you can burst to peak performance
for up to 30 minutes, as long as you have credits available.
Bursting allows you to provision your VMs and disks for your
baseline performance needs, instead of for max performance,
allowing you to save costs.
We recently announced a preview of on-demand disk bursting.
This is a new, unique capability on Azure which allows you
to burst your performance much higher, and at any time,
without worrying about burst credits.
This feature is applicable to larger disks and is ideal for
handling infrequent and unpredictable high-traffic spikes.
For example, you have a 1TB disk that occasionally needs
to spike to 20,000 I/Os, or 1000 MB per second throughput.
You can do that cost-effectively
by enabling on-demand bursting.
Now, what do you do if you need the high performance
for a longer period of time?
For example, for an event like Black Friday, or for running
a performance testing, or training environment,
where you need to maintain the higher performance
for a few hours, or for days.
That's where performance tiers come in.
They have this great new feature to increase the performance
by going to higher performance tiers for premium disks,
without increasing the actual disk size.
You can lower the tier later when you don't need it anymore.
So instead of using a larger disk, at a higher cost
to meet the peak performance, you can use a smaller disk
along with performance tiers, which means you pay for the
higher performance tier, only when you need it.
So this helps you lower your costs.
And now I will show you a demo of on-demand disk bursting.
This is a demo for the on-demand disk bursting feature.
First, let me show you how to enable
on-demand bursting on your disk.
It's really very easy.
All you have to do is run this simple command on your disk.
See the command in the PowerShell window at the bottom.
What I'm doing here, is setting this new property,
called bursting enabled, to true
and applying that on my disk.
This is the disk I am using.
Running the command now.
You have to execute this command before
attaching the disk to the VM.
All right, this is done.
And you can see that bursting-enabled flag is now true.
What I will do next is to attach the disk to the VM
and try out the performance.
This is the VM I'm going to use,
as you can see in the portal view.
Now I'm going to attach our disk to this VM.
This is the disk we just enabled bursting
and I'm going to go ahead and hit save.
While it's attaching the disk,
let's review the disc info here.
As you can see, this is a premium SSD disk
of 1TB in size with baseline performance of
5,000 I/Os and 200 MB per second, host cache is set to none.
Alright, it looks like the update is complete now.
I have a remote desktop session open for the VM.
And as you can see here, the disk that I just attached
has come through already, here.
And now I will run a benchmarking on the disk
to check its performance.
I'm going to use a tool called IO meter
for running this benchmark.
Let me quickly show you the config I'm using on IO meter.
We have many processes pertaining to that disk
and I'm planning to run 8 KB random right operations.
And this is a good configuration
for driving high I/Os on the disk.
And let me bring up the test results view.
This is showing 0 I/Os now,
as we haven't started the test yet.
Starting the run now.
All right, as you can see
the I/Os traffic is now picking up.
It's already more than 20,000 I/Os
and it can go all the way up to 30,000 I/Os we push it.
And as a reminder, this is a 1TB premium SSD disk,
normally capable of only up to 5,000 I/Os.
Now with on-demand bursting, the disk
is able to sustain well above that 5,000 I/Os baseline.
Isn't this amazing!
Another unique capability for Azure Disks is shared disks.
You can attach the same disc to multiple VMs
which gives you a simplified architecture and lower cost.
The idea here is that if one VM becomes unavailable,
another VM can seamlessly take over the workload.
Azure Disk Storage is the only
shared block storage in the cloud today
that supports both Windows and Linux based cluster
or high availability application, with full support
for clustering, using SCSI position reservation.
This enables you to easily migrate your cluster workloads
like SQL FCI or Windows server clusters
or Linux cluster environments to Azure.
Shared Disk is supported on both premium SSD and Ultra Disks
so you can get a balance of price and performance
based on your needs.
Another unique capability we recently announced is
the preview of zone redundant storage for Azure disks.
Typically, a block storage solution uses
Locally Redundant Storage, LRS, where we use multiple
repeat calls within a single zone or a data center.
Now, you have a second option for redundancy: to use ZRS,
which spreads the replicas
across 3 different zones in a region.
ZRS can provide protection against outages that can affect
the whole data center, though it's very rare.
Now imagine using ZRS in a shared disk configuration,
attaching the same ZRS disk to VMs in 3 different zones,
providing the workload with
the ultimate production for high availability.
I talked about premium disk performance here earlier
and how you can leverage that feature
to provision higher performance
to meet your increased workload needs.
Now, I want to show you a preview of what's coming next.
Wouldn't that be nice if you can upgrade
that premium disk performance tier
without disrupting your production workload?
Let's take a look.
This is a demo for a live update of disk performance tier.
Let me show you how it's done.
This is the VM I'm going to use for this demo.
As you can see, it's a running VM.
Let's look at the disks next.
I will use this one data disk on the VM for this demo.
And as you can see here, it says premium SSD disk,
of size 128GB, which is a P10 disk capable of
500 IOPS and 100MB per second throughput.
A typical, real-life scenario will be that you have
a workload running on this disk,
and the workload may have grown over time,
and so you need a higher performance from the disk.
Or, you have a seasonality with the workload
and you expect to need a higher performance
for a period of time.
You can do that easily now, with the live update feature,
without disrupting the workload running on the VM.
I will use this command, you can see
in the lower part of the screen, for doing the live update.
This is our disk and I'm going to try to set it to P30 disk.
Let me execute this command, now.
It will take some time to run,
and once it's complete, the tier will change to P30,
capable of 5,000 I/Os and 200 MB per second throughput.
Live update feature is currently in preview
and I'm using a template deploy method here
for executing this command.
We will be adding other ways to do the live update
including portal UI, PowerShell, and CLI support.
Okay, the update is complete, now.
Let's look at that disk tier next to verify it.
I'm going to run the command to show the tier of this disk.
All right, the new tier is now showing P 30,
after we did the live update.
Until now, we talked about how to use Azure Disk Storage
with Azure virtual machines.
I want to share that we are working on extending that
to include other host solutions as well.
As you may know, VMware solutions running in the cloud today
cannot use the regular, persistent block storage
on any cloud platform.
Very soon we will be announcing support for using Azure Disk
with VMware solution.
We are super excited about offering this unique experience
for Azure VMware solutions.
Stay tuned for more details, and you can sign up
for preview using the link shown here.
In addition to the
native Azure platform capabilities we talked about,
we also have a rich ecosystem of partners
that offer solutions built on Azure across many categories,
including migration, backup and DR,
container management, and SAM.
Some of them are shown here.
And finally, to learn more about Azure Disk Storage,
please check out the resources listed here.
We have great content and documentation
for you to explore in more detail.