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Microsoft beefs up Azure data warehouse with tripled compute power
Microsoft Corp. announced a major update to its Azure SQL Data Warehouse service at its Inspire partner conference on Monday, delivering some serious enhancements to its compute and storage capabilities that allow users to carry out “petabyte-scale” analysis.
Microsoft said the update is designed to meet the increasing demands of Azure SQL Data Warehouse users, who have been crying out for greater data processing capabilities from the platform.
To deliver this, the company has introduced new, larger virtual machine types that can power each node at a maximum of 18,000 data warehouse units, or DWU, which is an abstracted measure of compute resources such as central processing unit power, memory and input/output bandwidth. The previous limit was 6,000 DWU per SQL Data Warehouse node. In addition, a 9,000-DWU node is also being made available.
The company is also adding large memory-chip-based drives to the new SQL Data Warehouse nodes, which will be used to cache as much data as possible. Previously, SQL Data Warehouse had only been able to access cloud-based storage. Doing so allows for data processing and storage to be scaled separately because cloud storage persists when virtual machines are stopped and de-allocated, though it comes at the cost of slower disk access times.
The move is an important update because it means Microsoft can better compete with Amazon Web Services, whose rival Amazon Redshift service uses SSDs exclusively. SQL Data Warehouse now offers a kind of hybrid architecture in which cloud storage remains as the persistence layer and allows for compute and storage to be scaled separately, with local SSDs used as a second layer of cached storage to deliver a higher performance.
“With this preview, customers can scale their data warehouse workloads in Azure to new heights; driving answers to the most demanding analytical questions using our fully featured, enterprise class, SQL engine,” said Rohan Kumar, general manager, database systems group at Microsoft. “Unlimited columnar storage is also important, as the diversity, variety and volume of customer data continues to grow at exponential rates.”
The update is currently being offered as a preview, and those who want to test it out can sign up for it in the Azure Portal.
Image: KamiPhuc/Flickr
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