New series of Microsoft Azure VMs (D-Series) for Big Data and Analytics

We’ve just announced a new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Web/Worker Roles (D-Series ).

The new sizes are defined as follows:

Local Storage SSD Drive

On these new sizes, the temporary drive (D:\ on Windows, /mnt or /mnt/resource on Linux) are local SSDs. This high-speed local disk is best used for workloads that replicate across multiple instances, like MongoDB, or can leverage this high I/O disk for a local and temporary cache, like SQL Server 2014′s Buffer Pool Extensions. Note, these drives are not guaranteed to be persistent. Thus, while physical hardware failure is rare, when it occurs, the data on this disk may be lost, unlike your OS disk and any attached durable disks that are persisted in Azure Storage.

SQL 2014 Buffer Pool Extensions

Buffer Pool Extensions (BPE), introduced in SQL Server 2014, allows extending the SQL Engine Buffer Pool using local SSDs to significantly improve the read latency of database workloads. The Buffer Pool is a global memory resource used to cache data pages for more efficient reads. Database read scenarios where the working set doesn’t fit in the memory will benefit significantly from configuring BPE.

With the local SSDs available on the D-Series Virtual Machines in Azure, you can now achieve unprecedented read speeds for SQL Server.

Please find more details in Azure Blog.