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Microsoft boosts Azure's VM creds with price cuts and GS

D-range storage drops its pants

Gavin Clarke Thu 3 Sep 2015 // 14:46 UTC

Microsoft has increased the size of its compute-and storage-centric cloud VM instances while cutting prices by up to 27 per cent.

The software giant has announced the GS family of VMs, running on Xeon E5 v3 chips with up to 64TB of storage.

It surpasses the G-series instances released in January, with a maximum limit of 6.59TB using Solid State Drive.

GS also packs up to 32 cores and delivers 80,000 I/Os per second and 2,000 MB/s of storage throughput.

Microsoft claimed the G and GS deliver 20Gbps of network bandwidth, more than double that of “the closest VMs of any hyperscale public cloud provider.”

The firm is pitching GS at SQL, and NoSQL workloads in the cloud. In a further attempt to grab the attention of big-data munchers, Microsoft will cut the price of its D and DS-series instances by up to 27 per cent on October 1.

DS was unveiled in December 2014 as Azure Premium Storage with up to 224GB and employing SSD for temporary storage for the virtual machine and data cache.

Separately, Microsoft introduced licensing changes for its Enterprise Cloud Suite – introduced in December 2014 – that were announced by the company in July. Enterprise Cloud Suite is now covered by a full, per-user license model with suite discounts for Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite and Windows SA Per User. Licensing deals can now run for one, two and three-year lengths. ®

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