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Thursday, May 31, 2012

Windows Azure Storage limitations

clips

Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets - Windows Azure Storage Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Scalability and Performance Targets

Now that we have given a high level description of storage accounts, storage abstractions and how they are grouped into partitions, we want to talk about the scalability targets for storage accounts, objects and their partitions.

The following are the scalability targets for a single storage account:

  • Capacity – Up to 100 TBs
  • Transactions – Up to 5,000 entities/messages/blobs per second
  • Bandwidth – Up to 3 gigabits per second

The 100TB is a strict limit for a storage account, whereas the transactions and bandwidth are the current targets we’ve built the system to for a single storage account. Note, the actual transaction and bandwidth achieved by your storage account will very much depend upon the size of objects, access patterns, and the type of workload your application exhibits. To go above these targets, a service should be built to use multiple storage accounts, and partition the blob containers, tables and queues and objects across those storage accounts.  By default, a subscription gets 5 storage accounts, and you can contact customer support to get more storage accounts if you need to store more than that (e.g., petabytes) of data.  

It is expected that a hosted service needs up to as many storage accounts to meet its performance targets given the above, which is typically a handful of storage accounts to up to 10s of storage accounts to store PBs of data.   The point here is that a hosted service should not plan on creating a separate storage account for each of its customers.  Instead, the hosted service should either represent a customer within a storage account (e.g., each customer could have its own Blob Container), or map/hash the customer’s data across the hosted service’s storage accounts.

Windows Azure Storage: Cloud Storage | Blob Storage | Cloud Drive

Commitment pricing for storage capacity for the initial subscription term of six months is as follows:

Storage Commitment

Price

Discount off Standard Rate

1 - 50 TB / month

$0.11 / GB

10.7%

51 - 500 TB / month

$0.096 / GB

20%

501 - 1,000 TB / month

$0.093 / GB

26.4%

1,001 TB - 5 PB / month

$0.083 / GB

29.3%

Greater than 5 PB / month

Please contact us

Please contact us

If you intend to purchase more than 50 Terabytes, please contact us prior to completing your purchase so we can facilitate and expedite your onboarding.

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