Hot of the press is the announcement of MS Azure support for local SSD, up to 800GB which should be enough for “most” TempDBs.
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/09/22/new-d-series-virtual-machine-sizes/
Now this doesn’t have me too excited as its volatile and core storage is still a bit challenging to get IOPS on, especially if you need “burst” capability. What has me super excited is the introduction of the “memory” intensive images, or the D series with very competitive pricing.
Annoyingly the pricing is a bit misleading as provisioning page has the price above (768.48 per month), but the pricing page has a different price
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines
If we look at a 16 core server options with close to 128GB ram we can compare the old and new offerings against Amazon. The only way to get 16 cores before was via the A9 image and it was really pricey, now we have local SSD thrown in for 51% price drop (ok with no infiniband, but I’m good with the trade).
| Azure (Old Pricing) | Azure (new) | Amazon EC2 | |
| Name | A9 | STANDARD_D14 | r3.4xlarge |
| Cost/Month € | 2,715 | 1,314 | 1,092 |
| Spec | 16 Cores 112 GB 40 GBit Infiniband | 16 Cores 112 GB 800GB Local SSD | 16 Cores 122 GB 2x320GB Local SSD |
So, while the price for 16 core images has come down a lot its still not as competitive as the Amazon offering.
What is it missing to be a technically superior solution to Amazon for running SQL Server. A few things IMO:
- Provisioned IOPS
- Wholesale Replacement of old fashioned Magnetic Media with SSD
- Burst Capably on IOPS
Amazon still has these trump cards and while it does, it will be holding the technical edge for running SQL Server at the high end on demanding IO based workloads.
However todays announcement is a huge leap forward. If you can leverage the Local SSD and/or don’t need massive IOPS then you can pocket a higher business value.
