Industry’s First Cloud Shared Block Storage Supporting Windows & Linux-based clustered

Do you want to run your latency-sensitive cluster on the cloud, but you wish to use centralized block-level storage? No problem. Azure is releasing a new general availability industry’s first shared cloud block storage that supports both Windows & Linux-based clustered or high-availability applications.

Azure Disks Storage introducing a new general availability feature- Shared disks. This feature allows you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously (basically creating shared block storage), and enables you to either migrate or deploy new clustered applications to Azure.

Industry’s first shared cloud block storage is now available on Azure

With this new future, you can run latency-sensitive workloads without compromising on well-known deployment patterns for fast failover and high availability. Azure Shared Disks are best suited for clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications.

If you’re interested in trying shared disks then sign up here for access.

Note: As Azure Shared Disk is block-level storage, it doesn’t offer a fully managed file system or a cluster manager, that can handle cluster node communications and write locking.

Disk size

For now, only ultra disks and premium SSDs can enable shared disks. Different disk sizes may have a different maxShares limit, which you cannot exceed when setting the maxShares value. For pricing information, visit the Azure Disks pricing page.

For more information check out Azure documentation.

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