Microsoft is enhancing its Azure Site Recovery service with a new disaster recovery option that relies on solid-state drives instead of traditional spinning disks.

Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s chief business continuity offering, and existing customers can replicate their most critical workloads to Azure’s Premium Storage as a backup. Instead of storing that data on hard drives, Azure Premium Storage uses SSDs to speed up cloud applications and their related storage operations.

Now, thanks to a new upgrade, customers can use those SSDs to avert major disruptions to their most critical applications.

“If you are running I/O [input/output] intensive enterprise workloads on-premises, we recommend that you replicate these workloads to Premium Storage,” Poornima Natarajan, a Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise program manager, wrote in a blog post. “At the time of a failover of your on-premises environment to Azure, workloads replicating to Premium storage will come up on Azure virtual machines running on high speed solid state drives (SSDs) and will continue to achieve high-levels of performance, both in terms of throughout and latency.”

Natarajan said that Premium Storage ensures applications will run with performance ratings of up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), with 2 gigabytes per second disk throughout. Customers still need a standard cloud storage account in order to set up Azure Site Recovery with Premium Storage, but Natarajan says this will help to keep a lid on costs. For example, Premium Storage plans start at $19.71 per months for a 128 GB disk, whereas Standard Azure storage starts at just $0.05 per gigabyte, or $6.40 per month for similar capacity.

For now, replicating to Premium Storage supports VMware Inc.’s virtual machines and servers, but not Microsoft’s own Hyper-V offering, though that is coming soon, Natarajan said. In situations where there’s a failover of workloads to Azure, stricken applications can only be brought back to life on the company’s DS or GS virtual machines.

Another new option allows customers to replicate their workloads to Locally Redundant Storage accounts, Natarajan said. Microsoft still recommends the Geo-Redundant Storage option where data is backed up to another Azure region, but Locally Redundant Storage is the best option for those enterprises who’re not allowed to move data to different regions due to governance policies.

in related news, Microsoft announced the general availability of Recovery Services Vault last week. Recovery Services Vault is a new service that consolidates Site Recovery management and Operations Management Suite Backup, a System Center add-on that provides monitoring and management capabilities for hybrid clouds.

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