Azure Disk Storage
High-performance, highly durable block storage for Azure Virtual Machines
Choose the right disk storage for your performance and price needs
Designed to be used with Azure Virtual Machines and Azure VMware Solution, Azure Disk Storage offers high-performance, durable block storage for your mission- and business-critical applications. Confidently migrate to Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with disk storage options built for the cloud—–Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD—to optimize costs and performance for your workload. Get sub-millisecond latency for high-throughput and transaction-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, SQL Server, and Oracle.
Cost-effective disk storage
Run clustered or high-availability applications cost effectively in the cloud using shared disks.
Unmatched resiliency
Get consistent enterprise-grade durability with a 0% annual failure rate.
Seamless scalability
Meet demand without performance disruption by using Ultra Disk Storage.
Built-in security
Secure your data with automatic encryption using Microsoft-managed keys or your own.
Maximize your investment and business impact
Optimize costs and get the precise amount of disk storage you need for your workloads. Disk options come in sizes from 4 GB to 64 TB at a variety of price points and performance characteristics. Reduce time and costs for backup and disaster recovery with incremental snapshots, which are point-in-time backups for disks that consist of only the changes between snapshots. Lift and shift your Windows and Linux-based clustered or high-availability applications to Azure with shared disks, keeping your architecture as-is and reducing storage costs.
Ensure business continuity and minimize disruptions
Run business-critical applications and avoid costly downtime with redundancy options, including zone-redundant storage which copies your data across multiple zones in a region and protects your disks in the event of a zone failure.
Azure offers single-instance service-level agreements (SLA) for all disk types, with a best-in-class single-instance SLA of 99.9 percent availability for Azure Virtual Machines using Premium SSD or Ultra Disk Storage. Minimize disruption to your business with support from Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.
Scale easily and quickly with the performance you need
Get the performance and capacity you need and scale from gigabytes to petabytes of storage. Scale performance on-demand with performance tiers and built-in bursting capabilities to meet business needs. Achieve high performance even at low storage capacities—Azure Ultra Disk Storage and Premium SSD v2 have the flexibility to configure your IOPS (input/output operations per second), throughput, and capacity independently. Create and manage disks easily by selecting the disk type and size.
Help protect your most valuable data
Safeguard sensitive data with the encryption option that meets your security and compliance requirements, including encryption-at-rest, encryption-in-transit, and double-encryption for enhanced security. Restrict access to your data by using Azure Private Link to allow import and export only from your private Azure virtual network. Manage and control access to your data by assigning specific permissions with Azure role-based access control.
Use cases and workloads
Relational databases
Scale to meet your performance needs for handling top-tier databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP HANA.
NoSQL databases
Get consistent low latency for latency-sensitive NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and CouchDB.
Backup and disaster recovery
Minimize disruptions, lower costs, and reduce time spent on backup and recovery with point-in-time snapshots and solutions built by Microsoft partners.
Clustered applications
Easily migrate your on-premises Windows- and Linux-based clustered or high-availability applications to Azure. Run your most demanding enterprise applications—such as clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications—in the cloud.
Containerized workloads
Take advantage of high-performance, low-latency block storage for mission-critical stateful applications running in Kubernetes.
Azure VMware Solution
Access high-performance, durable block storage on Azure for your data-intensive and transaction-heavy workloads running on Azure VMware Solution. Scale your storage on-demand and independent of compute resources, enabling you to optimize costs. Learn more about disk pool.
Overview of Azure Disk Storage security features
Learn about the security features of Azure Disk Storage that help protect your data and meet your organization’s security and compliance needs.
Run clustered applications with Azure shared disks
Azure Disk Storage is the only shared cloud block storage that supports both Windows and Linux-based clustered or high-availability applications via Azure shared disks. Learn how shared disks enables you to run your mission-critical workloads in Azure.
Understanding disk I/O and how to leverage disk bursting
Take advantage of the built-in bursting features of Azure Disk Storage to achieve higher performance and cost savings. Discover new disk utilization metrics that help identify performance bottlenecks caused by virtual machines or disk capping.
Access more capabilities through Microsoft partners
Tap into a rich partner ecosystem offering a wide range of solutions for database migration, backup, and disaster recovery. Microsoft partners use the unique REST API support capability in Disk Storage to build solutions at lower costs.
Enhanced security and compliance
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Microsoft invests more than USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development.
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We employ more than 3,500 security experts dedicated to data security and privacy.
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Azure has more certifications than any other cloud provider. View the comprehensive list.
Get the data disk storage you need at competitive prices
Choose the disk type you need —Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD—and use multiple disks with each virtual machine. Lower your total cost of ownership by purchasing disk storage reservations at a discounted rate. Use the pricing calculator to configure and estimate the cost of your disk storage.
Documentation, training, and resources
Learning modules
Learn how to provision disk storage on Azure with step-by-step guidance from Microsoft Learn.
Videos and webinars
Watch videos and on-demand Azure webinars for demos, best practices, and technical insights.
Documentation and quickstarts
Explore the Azure Disk Storage documentation for quickstarts, tutorials, and best practices.
Learn more about Premium SSD v2.
Find the right virtual machines and disk storage for your needs and budget with the virtual machine selector.
Blog and updates
Read the Azure blog and subscribe to Azure updates for the latest news and information about Azure Disk Storage.
Infographic: Why Azure Disk Storage
Learn about the storage characteristics to consider early in your cloud migration journey and how Azure Disk Storage can help.
Making smart block storage decisions in the cloud
Minimize costs and maximize business growth by making smart block storage decisions in the cloud.
Trusted by companies of all sizes
Matt Fleck, PLM Global Platform Manager, Procter & Gamble"Once we implemented Ultra Disk Storage, we had our eureka moment. We knew our initial move to the cloud would be challenging; however, it was less daunting once we saw the throughput those disks could give us."
Mitsunori Fujimoto, Manager of the Development IT Support Team, SEGA Corporation"PSO2 had been running on a Windows server, so we had expected that the game would be compatible with Ultra Disk as well, and it was even better than that. Because Ultra Disk showed very high performance, we did not have any trouble in the migration and the tuning."
Guy Speier, Vice President of Technology and Engineering, Pearson VUE"The speed of Azure Disk Storage is amazing to us. We've run tests with both flat files and databases, and we were floored time after time at how performant the underlying disk is."
Matt Douglas, Chief Enterprise Architect, Sentara Healthcare"Our tests with Azure Ultra Disk Storage have far surpassed our current production system—up to four times our current workload capacity. As a healthcare organization, we are breaking down barriers with Ultra Disk Storage and the M-series virtual machines."
Frequently asked questions about Disk Storage
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Data disks on Ultra Disk Storage hold up to 64 TB per disk. Data disks on Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD hold up to 32 TB. The number of data disks you can use depends on the size of the virtual machine.
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Each of the four disk types differs in performance characteristics, so you can configure your storage based on your application needs. Learn about performance guidelines for Ultra Disk Storage or Premium SSDs.
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After you purchase a reservation, a discount is automatically applied to the disk resources that match the terms of your reservation. The reservation discount applies to disk SKUs only. Learn more about reservation discounts.
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Bursting is enabled by default on new and existing deployments of the supported virtual machines and disks—no additional steps required. Learn more about bursting.