Revamped Azure cloud uses OCZ SSDs

Posted by in Cloud storage

Microsoft is taking the fight to Amazon, cutting Azure cloud storage transaction prices by 90 per cent.

A statement on Microsoft’s Windows Azure team blog says: “We heard you loud and clear that you really want cheaper transaction costs for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables, Queues, and Drives. We’re therefore very happy today to slash transaction prices 10 fold for Windows Azure Storage and CDN. Because of this it now costs $0.01 for 100,000 transactions ($1 per 10 million).”

Microsoft introduced this and new features, “including built-in VM, Website, Storage, and Cloud Service monitoring support,” for Azure on Wednesday , via a blog written by Scott Guthrie, a Microsoft Developer Division VP. Azure now supports the power to deploy and run durable virtual machines (VMs), that’s VMs whose state persists across reboots.

Guthrie’s blog mentions other new features added to Azure: “new Virtual Private Networking capabilities, new Service Bus runtime and tooling support, the general public preview of the recent Azure Media Services, new Data Centers, significantly upgraded network and storage hardware, SQL Reporting Services, new Identity features, support within 40+ new countries and territories, and far, a lot more.”

Solid state

The new “storage hardware” is believed to incorporate solid state drives (SSDs) and these are, informed sources say, OCZ drives.

According to a Gigaom source, Azure’s “all-SSD block storage infrastructure boosts performance and differentiates Azure from AWS, which offers solid state storage, but only with some higher-end services like DynamoDB.”

OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen said inside the latest OCZ earnings call that the corporate had recently won business from “a number one cloud and content delivery provider.” Here’s now considered Azure.

Our sources with reference to OCZ let us know that the world’s largest independent SSD company is supplying SSDs, possibly Z-Drive R4 drives with VXL caching software, to Microsoft to be used by the Azure cloud. That might be a giant win for OCZ and elevate its credibility as an enterprise SSD supplier sky-high. ®

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