Hey all welcome to Azure IaaS Day Digital Event.
This is our session on disk storage.
My name is Sirius Kuttiyan,
I lead product management for Azure Disks.
In this session I'll go over how Azure Disks
can help increase scalability, performance and availability
for your business critical workloads.
I will share our latest innovations,
and show a couple of cool demos as well.
Azure Storage is durable,
meaning we make multi-protocols of every data written.
It's also highly available and massively scalable.
Azure Disk is our block storing offering.
It is designed for business critical applications
like SAP HANA, top tier databases,
and other transaction heavy workloads.
To highlight a few strengths of our platform.
Number one, Azure Disk have the industry leading durability.
We literally deliver 0% annual failure rate,
which means we never lost customer data.
Secondly, we have the best single instance VM SLA
for SSD disks.
Third, we have the best API support for block storage,
which lets our ISVs build really rich, advanced experience
for scenarios like backup migration and DevOps,
which they cannot do on any other platform.
Lastly, we also have shared disks and ZRS
which are truly differentiated offers,
providing high availability
for your mission critical workloads,
and I'll talk more about that in later slides.
In Azure Disk, we have four types of disk offerings.
For your most IO-intensive and demanding workloads,
like SAP HANA,
Ultra Disk delivers the best performance
and it offers the ability to configure capacity, IOPS,
throughput independently,
and then automatically scale the performance up and down
so you get the optimal performance and cost
for your workload needs.
Premium SSD's our default disk offering.
It gives you the right balance of performance and cost
and it's ideal for majority
of your enterprise production workloads.
For other workloads that need consistent performance,
but not as IO-intensive,
we have another option of SSDs called Standard SSD.
It's ideal for workloads like web servers,
or likely use enterprise application like small databases.
For other low cost storage scenarios,
we also have Standard HDD.
It could be used for things like backup or test,
which doesn't require the highest performance.
So 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 the categories shown here,
you can find the right solution on Azure.
For example,
your most IO-intensive workloads,
the right solution will be Ultra Disk.
For your most other generic enterprise production workloads,
you could use Premium SSD disks.
For scenarios like cluster applications,
such as SQL FCI,
you can use our share disk,
which come with the full support for clustering.
We discuss ZPR and so on.
And if it's our new disk pool offering,
you can also access
the high-performance durable block storage
from Azure, VMware Solutions.
Azure, this totally enables customers
to scale to meet the demand
but also providing the optimal performance
for the workloads.
I want to highlight some of that latest innovations
in this space.
We have now doubled the Ultra Disk throughput
to 4,000 MB per second.
A single Ultra Disk can is anywhere up
to four gigabytes per second of traffic.
Of course you also need the latest VMCDs like Ebs v5,
currently in preview to drive that high throughput.
Or you could also spread the load
across multiple VDMs using shared Ultra Disks.
Next, let me show you a quick demo of how
to set the 4,080 per second throughput on Ultra Disk.
So in this demo,
I'm going to show how to create an Ultra Disk
with 4,000 mb per second throughput.
So I'm on creator resource view on portal
and I'm going to create a manage disk.
I'm going to choose West US 2 region
with its Ultra Disk.
and I'm going to choose the right resource group
in the region.
And let me give a name for this disk.
And I need to also pick an availability zone,
but I want Ultra Disk
and now I want to pick Ultra Disk.
So by default it shows Premium,
so let me switch to Ultra
and here I can choose the disk size, IOPs,
and throughput I want.
So I want to go the really high IOPs.
Let's say I want to use 120,000 IOPs,
and now I need to specify that throughput.
So here I'm going to go with 4,000MBps.
Click okay and review and create.
The validation passed and creation is now going through.
It will take just a moment for the creation to go through,
maybe a minute or so,
then the Ultra Disk will be created and ready to use
from that point onwards.
Yep, it's already done.
I can go back to the overview of the disk.
And if go back,
that is it. I can see the disk here
and you can see the performance on the disk.
You can see here it's an Ultra Disk,
one gigabyte size, and 4,000 mb per second throughput.
It's very quick.
You could of course use a PowerShell, CLI or API as well.
Now I want to share an example
of how a customer is using Ultra Disk
to achieve the high performance they need
for their mission critical workload.
P&G is a leader in CG industry
with iconic brands, such as Tide, Gillette, Dawn,
and many more.
They were looking to move
a mission critical manufacturing application to the cloud.
It was a complex process
because of the performance requirements.
With a high IOPs and throughput Ultra Disk,
they were able to successfully migrate to Azure
and achieve performance that matched
or exceeded what they were seeing on premises.
P&G also took advantage
of the flexibility that Ultra Disk provides
to dynamically change the performance without any downtime.
Now I want to highlight the performance scaling capabilities
that Azure Disk offers and that enables you
to scale your performance, cost-effectively.
For usual unplanned scenarios,
where you need high performance for a short period of time,
we can only offer two bursting capabilities.
Credit-based bursting for small disks
and virtual machine bursting.
Both are suitable for typical scenarios,
like improving boot times,
or processing small batch jobs that make the I0 spike
or any other unexpected traffic spikes
that may come your way.
So this capability is available to you
at no additional cost,
and it's based on credit-based system,
where you can burst to a peak performance
for up to 30 minutes in a day.
The bursting allows you to provision your VMs and disks
for your baseline average performance needs,
instead of max performance,
allowing you to save your costs.
Now, we recently announced the general availability
of on-demand disk bursting.
This is a unique capability,
only offered on Azure.
It allows you to burst your performance much higher
and at any time,
without worrying about the burst credits.
For on-demand bursting, there is a small fee to enable it,
and then there will be a charge for additional transactions
that go above the provision limit.
This feature is ideal for smoothly handling infrequent
and unpredictable traffic spikes.
For example, your 1 Tb disk occasionally needs a spike
to 20,000 IOPs, or a thousand per mb per second.
You can do that, cost-effectively,
by enabling on-demand bursting,
instead of provisioning high throughput IOPs
all the time on the disk.
Now,
what do you do if you need the high performance
for a long period of time?
For example, for an event like Black Friday
or running performance testing,
or training enrollment where you need
to maintain high performance for a few hours or days.
That is where performance tiers come in.
That the third column listed here,
we have this great new feature
to increase the disk performance by going
to higher performance tier for Premium Disk,
without increasing the actual disk size,
and you can lower the tier later
when you don't need it anymore.
So instead of using a larger disk at a high cost
to meet the peak performance,
you can use a smaller disk along with performance tiers,
which means you pay for higher performance tier,
only when you need it.
This also helps lower your cost
and lets you achieve the high-performance
your workload may need anytime.
Along with scaling the performance to meet the demand,
there might be scenarios where you need
to grow your disk size as your data footprint grows
or your performance requirements change.
Customers can now dynamically increase their disk size,
without any downtime to their applications
with the live resize capability in preview.
Live resize gives you the confidence
that you can deploy a disk today
and easily make changes in the future,
without disrupting your workloads.
So next, I'm going to demo live resize,
so I'm going to use Disk VM.
As you can see, it's running VM,
and let's look at the disks.
It has two data disks,
both are Premium SSD, one LRS, one ZRS,
and I'm going to probably use the first one for the demo
and let's go into the details.
And that's going to size and performance
and I'm using portal for the demo.
You could of course do the same with a partial CLI or API.
So to increase the disk size,
all I have to do is to go to this view,
and this is a place they show the disk size
and I can edit the disk size.
Let's say I want to go with a positive gigabyte,
and click resize and it's updating the disk.
Sometimes it will take a few moments to go through.
I have an RDP running on the VM
and I want to show what we have on the VM.
So this is was a VM,
and as you can see here,
you see the same disks here.
This is the other disk, 900 gig
and you can see the second disk as well.
And that is the volumes,
and these are disks here, as well, 900, 256.
Let's see if our disk sizing process is complete or not.
So I'm going to refresh the disk here,
So you can see, the disk size is now 1000.
That's the live resize size we did.
What do you go do next is to go into the volumes,
'cause volume size is still showing 900 here.
So you're going to just click on it and external volume.
And as you can see current sizing 900,
but you have a new map size of 1000
because you expanded that disk size.
I can enter 1000 here and expand that volume
to the new size that I resized it to.
And if I go here and refresh it now, now this is also 1000.
We continue to make investments
to further improve the reliability of our infrastructure.
And we also make new solutions available to customers
for improving the availability of their workloads.
A unique capability that is now generally available
on Azure is Zoned Redundant Storage for Azure disks.
Typically,
block storage solutions use Locally Redundant Storage.
Where we use multiple replicas within a single zone.
Now we have second option for redundancy to use ZRS,
which stretch the replicas
across three different zones in a region.
ZRS provides the industry's only synchronous replication
of block storage across three zones a region.
In leveling your disks to tolerate zonal failures,
which might occur due to natural disasters
or other issues.
Now imagine using ZRS disks in a shared disk configuration,
attaching the same ZRS disk to VMs in three different zones,
providing your workload with the ultimate protection
for high availability, only possible on Azure.
The configuration may look something like this.
The scenarios using ZRS
for cluster or distributed applications
like SQLs or FCI or SAP, AAS, ASCS
leveraging windows server failure cluster
with a combination of shared disk and ZRS.
Here, you have a shared ZRS disk,
which has replicas in all three zones
mounted to two VMs in two different availability zones.
With the idea that if there's a failure in any data center
or any zone that impacts the VM,
the other VM will continue to function
and provide high availability for your workload,
and the disk is continued to be available also as well.
Next, let me do a quick demo of how to configure CRS
and share this for a clustered configuration.
For this demo,
I want to show how to configure shared disk with ZRS
for high availability configuration,
so I'm going to use a couple of VMs I have
in this resource group.
Let me group them.
So I have two VMS in this resource group.
This VM one, let's look at VM one.
Settings and availabilities on one,
and let's also look at the disks in that VM.
It has one premium ZRS disk.
You can see this name, I share this one.
Let me go back and look at the second VM.
That VM is in availability zone two,
and it has the same disk attached to that:
mysharedzrsdisk1.
Attach to same VM.
So in this configuration,
you have two VMs in two availability zones,
pointing to the same ZRS disk.
And the two VMs are running Windows server failover cluster,
and Windows server failover cluster handles
the shared cluster configuration for that VM.
It says the right SKUs CPR permissions,
and it takes care of all the clustering
and access control on those disks.
So this, as you can see,
this is a very simple, straightforward configuration.
Two VMs in two zones and the same disk attached to both VMs
in the shared desk configurations.
So let's talk about a few scenarios
where you can leverage ZRS and shared disks.
Here's a scenario using ZRS disk
with multi-zone AKS clusters.
The customers can leverage ZRS disk
for their container applications hosted on multi-zone AKS
for cyber liability.
And that is that if a zone goes down,
AKS will automatically failover the stateful part
to a healthy zone by detaching and attaching the ZRS disk
to notes in the healthy zone.
You can also use the ZRS to achieve higher availability
for legacy applications.
You know, some of the legacy applications don't support
application level synchronous duplications.
So in that case,
ZRS disk will provide the improved availability
through storage level replication.
ZRS and shared disks can also be used
to achieve maximum availability
for clustered SAP applications.
We recently added support for the SAP scenarios
with shared disks.
Recap the key takeaways.
Number one,
Ultra Disk provides that high performance,
low latency for your most demanding workloads.
Number two,
you can easily scale your performance and capacity
without downtime to adapt to changing workload needs
along with bursting capabilities.
And number three,
you can increase the availability
for your critical workloads with ZRS
and shared disks on Azure.
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.
Thank you for watching the session. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you have feedback,
feel free to reach out to Azure Disk's team.
It's azuredisk@microsoft.com.