We are excited to share the latest advancements in Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra disks, the next generation of Azure disk storage. We have enhanced the backup and disaster recovery experience for Pv2 and Ultra disks to help you protect your workloads with ease. In addition, we have improved the security measures for Virtual Machines (VMs) equipped with Pv2 and Ultra. Stay tuned as we delve into these exciting new features! 

Pv2 and Ultra disks offer high throughput, high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and low latency for scenarios ranging from input/output (IO)-intensive workloads like SAP High-performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) to general purpose applications across Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), SQL, and NoSQL databases. Pv2 features an unparalleled balance of price and performance—a 23% price-performance improvement over the competing cloud according to a 2023 GigaOm report—and Ultra provides top performance with low sub-millisecond latency.

Incremental snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra Disks—now generally available

In August 2023, we made incremental snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra disks generally available. Incremental snapshots are reliable and cost-effective point-in-time backups of your disks that store only the changes made since the last snapshot.

Switching to Premium SSD v2 disks empowers Teradata with enhanced flexibility to achieve optimal storage performance in our customers’ VantageCloud Lake environments. We are thrilled to witness the general availability of incremental snapshots for Premium SSD v2 disks as it enables swift recreation and recovery to new disks, leading to a faster and more seamless onboarding experience for our customers.

—Neeraj Jain, Director, Cloud Product Management, Teradata

Below are some common uses for incremental snapshots:

1. Backup: You can use incremental snapshots to create a point-in-time backup of Pv2 and Ultra disks to recover from accidental data loss.
2. Regional disaster recovery: You can protect against regional disasters by copying incremental snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra disks to any region of your choice.
3. Refresh development environments from production: You can create incremental snapshots of your Pv2 and Ultra disks in production and use these to update your development or training environment.

Premium SSD v2 disks and the snapshot feature are integral components powering our Unity DevOps Version Control in production. As we look ahead, we envision extending these powerful tools to further enhance Unity DevOps. Premium SSD v2 disks empower us to offer a high-performance cloud-based Version Control system that seamlessly supports real-time 3D projects on a global scale, using snapshots for scalability and recovery. Thanks to Premium SSD v2, we’ve been able to finely balance performance and cost, delivering exceptional value to our customers.

—Shanti Gaudreault, VP of Engineering, Unity Cloud Services

Fully managed backup and disaster recovery solutions

Beyond incremental snapshots, we’re excited to share the new Azure native fully managed backup and recovery solutions for Pv2 and Ultra disks. With these solutions, you can protect your VMs and disks in a single click.

General availability: Azure VM Backup with Pv2 and Ultra Disks

Azure VM Backup is a fully managed, simple, and secure backup solution designed to safeguard VMs against disasters. A vital component of the backup process involves taking application-consistent incremental snapshots of all disks attached to a VM. These snapshots are then securely transferred to the Recovery Services Vault for long-term storage.

To ensure business continuity and recovery in the event of disasters or ransomware attacks, you can enable Azure Backup on VMs equipped with Pv2 and Ultra disks. This enhancement further strengthens the robustness of our backup solution for Pv2 and Ultra disks. To learn more, refer to this documentation.

General availability: Azure Disk Backup with Pv2 and Ultra disks

Azure Disk Backup is a snapshot lifecycle management solution for disks. It automates periodic creation of incremental snapshots and retains them for however long you specify. It is an agentless solution and doesn’t impact production application performance. You can now enable Azure Backup on individual Pv2 and Ultra disks. To get started, refer to this documentation.

Private preview: Azure Site Recovery for Pv2 Disks

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) helps mitigate data loss through continuous replication of the source VM and disks to a secondary region. It minimizes the impact of outages by reducing application recovery time, and it reduces your infrastructure cost by simplifying deployment and management. ASR for Pv2 disks is now in private preview, you can fill out this form to sign up.

General availability: Application consistent VM restore points for Pv2 and Ultra Disks

Application consistent VM restore points are fundamental to backup and disaster recovery solutions. We achieve application consistency by using an agent running in the VM to capture memory content and pending input or output (I/O) operations while also ensuring the restore point is consistent across multiple disks of a VM. You can now create application consistent VM restore points for your VMs with Pv2 and Ultra disks. To get started, refer to this documentation.

Third-party backup and disaster recovery support

The backup and recovery experience on Pv2 and Ultra is also elevated by our third-party partners. Veeam, Rubrik, and OpenText now offer backup support for Pv2 and Ultra disks, and Veritas now offers backup support for Ultra disk.

Veeam Backup support for Pv2 and Ultra disks

Veeam Backup, a data protection and disaster recovery tool, now supports backups for VMs using Pv2 and Ultra disks. With Veeam Backup, you can create image-level backups and cloud-native snapshots of Azure VMs to restore entire VMs and their attached disks. For more information, check out what’s new in Veeam Backup and Replication and the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure User Guide.

Veeam is a strategic Microsoft partner, offering features to help protect against ransomware and provide added resilience for customers on-premises, in Azure and at the edge by allowing users to store their backups in Azure Blob, with support for immutability, ensuring data is safe and compliant with regulatory requirements. We support a wide variety of Azure workloads, and now are providing support for Premium v2 and Ultra Disk with Veeam Backup for Azure.

—Dave Russell, SVP, Head of Strategy at Veeam

Rubrik Security Cloud support for Pv2 and Ultra disks

Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) now provides backup support for VMs with Pv2 and Ultra disks. RSC is a comprehensive solution that helps you protect your data, monitor data risk, and recover data and applications. To learn more, see Rubrik Security Cloud and the documentation.

Rubrik’s customers understand the importance of having access to high-performance storage, and Microsoft’s Ultra Disk Premium V2 incremental snapshots Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disks will deliver just that. The integration with Rubrik will be incredibly smooth, designed to seamlessly secure customer’s valuable data—keeping it in safe hands. Kudos to Microsoft for their partnership in making data protection a seamless and hassle-free experience!

—Kesavan Palanichamy, Staff Product Manager at Rubrik

Veritas NetBackup Snapshot Manager support for Ultra disks

Veritas has expanded support of its NetBackup Snapshot Manager to include Ultra disks. With Veritas NetBackup, you can streamline the backup and recovery processes of your high-performance workloads using Ultra disk. For more information, check out the NetBackup Snapshot Manager for Cloud Install and Upgrade Guide (page 24).

Carbonite by OpenText Support for Pv2 and Ultra Disks

OpenText announced backup support for Pv2 and Ultra disk through Carbonite Availability, a tool to protect your data from incidents. With Carbonite Availability, you can quickly restore to a known point in time. To learn more, check out OpenText’s blog post on The Cost of Risk.

OpenText is committed to ensuring customers can take advantage of latest advancements on Azure Disk Storage for their enterprise data backup and recovery needs. Now, with the GA of incremental snapshots support for Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk and by the power of OpenText Migrate and OpenText Availability, customers can add recovery into a point-in-time snapshot for any supported Ultra Disk or Premium SSD v2. This expanded functionality empowers customers to efficiently restore to a known point, eliminating downtime and reducing costs associated with ransomware attacks!

—Jody Guffey, Vice President, Americas Sales at OpenText Cybersecurity

New security features for Pv2 and Ultra disks

In addition to backup and recovery enhancements, we’re delighted to share new security features available for Pv2 and Ultra disks. These features include encryption for your data at the VM host and enhanced security protections for your VMs using Pv2 and Ultra disk.

General availability: Encryption at host for Pv2 and Ultra disks

Encryption at host now supports Pv2 and Ultra disks. When you enable encryption at host, encryption starts on the VM host itself, the Azure server where your VM is allocated. The data is encrypted at the VM host and flows encrypted to the storage service. In addition, this feature will ensure that local storage on the VM host is encrypted at rest, which includes temporary storage on the VM as well as the host cache used with Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD disks. To learn more, read the documentation.

General availability: Trusted launch VM support for Pv2 and Ultra disks

Azure Trusted VM Launch now supports VMs with Pv2 and Ultra disks. It enhances the security of Azure Generation 2 VMs by a foundational compute security layer to protect VMs against advanced and persistent attack techniques such as bootkits and rootkits. For example, Trusted Launch provides secure boot by ensuring that VM boots use only software trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer. To learn more, read the documentation.

Get started with Pv2 and Ultra disks

With added backup support and security protections, our next generation of Azure disk storage is more ready than ever for your most demanding and mission-critical workloads. To get started with Pv2 and Ultra disks, check out how to deploy a Premium SSD v2 and how to deploy an Ultra disk.

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