Microsoft announced updates to many Azure services this week, previewing new services and moving others from preview to general availability as full working versions.

For those running virtual machines (VM) in the Azure cloud, there are now two ways of using SSDs to improve performance. In addition to the D series virtual machines that use SSD for a temporary disk that caches only data the VM is currently using, to speed up things like NoSQL database workloads or SQL Server caching, Microsoft is previewing Premium Storage using SSDs on its new DS series VMs.

With Premium Storage, users permanently attach one or more SSDs to their VM to get up to 32TB of fast, low-latency storage for running workloads like SQL Server, Oracle Database, MySQL, SAP Business Suite, Dynamics and other applications that need such high I/O speeds that they couldn’t normally be run in the cloud.

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