Microsoft Cloud Platform System: Storage Performance Overview Now Available

[MS Server]

Guest post by Dan Lovinger, Principal Software Engineer​

Hi everyone, I’m Dan Lovinger, a software and performance engineer on the Windows Server team. With the availability of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), we’re excited to now share an overview of storage-focused performance of a single rack CPS stamp, with real workloads, at real scale.​

The paper we’re releasing here covers the following three scenarios, scaled across a deployment of tenant virtual machines (VMs):​

• Scenario 1. Boot storm: cold start of VMs.
• Scenario 2. VM microbenchmarks: synthetic storage loads that are generated within VMs.
• Scenario 3. VM database OLTP: simulated database online transaction processing (OLTP) using Microsoft SQL Server, run within the VMs.

The following is a summary of the results.​

• Boot storm: ~1800 Azure A1-sized VMs* cold started within 150 seconds at a median start time of 20 seconds/VM
• VM microbenchmarks across 112 Azure A1-sized VMs:
  • 1.01 million 4KiB random read IOPS at an average latency of 0.90 milliseconds (ms), with 44% of SSU (storage scale unit) connectivity utilized
  • 321,000 mixed 4KiB (70:30) read/write IOPS at average latencies of 2.49ms read and 4.47ms write
• VM SQL Server database OLTP across 84 Azure A4-sized VMs
  • sustained ~35,000 transactions/second (s)
  • 222,000 total IOPS (182,000 read and 40,000 write) at an average 1.5ms read and 9.0ms write latency
  
  

* For details on Azure VM size specifications, see the Azure Virtual Machine Pricing guide.​

You can download our paper, "Microsoft Cloud Platform System Storage Performance," from the Microsoft Download Center.​

The following chart is a preview of performance optimized in the solid-state disk (SSD) tier. We hope you find it as exciting as we do!​

​

Dan

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