Microsoft offers flash based cloud storage for disaster recovery

Microsoft has opened up a flash based disaster recovery option which uses solid state drives instead of disk based storage. Thus, with this service availability customers can now use Azure Site Recovery to replicate virtual machines and servers to Microsoft’s high performance cloud storage service to obtain business continuity.

Enterprise customers using Azure Site Recovery, the company’s data continuity offering, can replicate their demanding workloads to the company’s premium storage tier of cloud storage. Here instead of placing data on traditional spinning disks, Azure premium storage plans use SSDs packed with flash chips to speed up cloud applications and associated storage operations.

Thus, with this new upgrade, the Redmond giant patrons can sign up those SSDs to help their businesses from being disrupted for critical applications.

According to the latest Microsoft blog post, premium storage provides applications with performance ratings of up to 80K IOPS and 2 gigabytes per second disk throughput.

Customers need to use a standard cloud storage account for replication logs to set up Azure site Recovery with Premium storage. This helps customers control costs compared with an all-SSD implementation. There is also cost difference between both- as premium storage plans start at $19.71 per month for a 128-gigabyte disk, whereas standard Azure storage plans start at 5 cents per Gigabyte, or $6.40 a month for comparable capacity.

As of now, Washington based software company’s Premium Storage supports VMware Virtual Machines as well as servers and pretty soon the support will be extended to the company’s own Hyper V virtualization platform.

At the same time, customers can also opt to replicate workloads to locally redundant storage accounts. This option is recommended for companies whose data governance policies restrict the movement of data across regions. For others, they can still use Geo-redundant storage that copies backup data to another Azure data center located in a different region.

The world renowned software giant has also announced the general availability of Recovery Services Vault, a service that consolidates Operations Management Suite Backup and Site Recovery Management. The Operations Management suite is a Microsoft system center add-on that provides hybrid cloud monitoring and management capabilities.