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Announcing the new premium-series hardware for SQL Managed Instance

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

We’re delighted to announce the public preview in a limited number of regions for the new premium-series hardware generations for Azure SQL Managed Instance, based on the latest generation of Intel® Xeon Scalable processors (3rd gen - Ice Lake).

 

New premium-series hardware generations offer significantly improved performance and scalability over the standard-series (also known as “Gen 5”) hardware offering, allowing you to migrate your more demanding database workloads to Azure SQL Managed Instance.

 

A new memory optimized option within the premium-series provides even more memory per vCore to meet the needs of your most memory-intensive workloads.

 

Introduction

The following table summarizes the key technical details for the new premium-series hardware generations in SQL Managed Instance:

 

Standard-series (Gen 5)

Premium-series

(preview)

Memory optimized premium-series

(preview)

CPU

Intel® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell),
Intel® SP-8160 (Skylake) and Intel® 8272CL (Cascade Lake) 2.5 GHz processors

Intel® 8370C (Ice Lake) 2.8 GHz processors

Intel® 8370C (Ice Lake) 2.8 GHz processors

Number of vCores

4-80 vCores

4-80 vCores

4-64 vCores

Memory

5.1 GB per vCore

Max 408 GB per instance

7 GB per vCore

Max 560 GB per instance

13.6 GB per vCore

Max 870 GB per instance

Max instance reserved storage

(depending on the number of vCores)

General Purpose: up to 16 TB

Business Critical: up to 4 TB

General Purpose: up to 16 TB

Business Critical: up to 5.5 TB

General Purpose: up to 16 TB

Business Critical: up to 16 TB

vCore price difference

-

+15% over standard-series

+40% over premium-series

+61% over standard-series

Key characteristics for SQL Managed Instance hardware configurations

 

Key takeaways

To learn more about the increased storage limits for Azure SQL Managed Instances, please refer to this blog post by Nevena Nikolic.

 

Performance results

It’s not a secret that a significant portion of database workloads performs faster when given additional memory – this is because more available memory allows SQL Server to come up with more efficient query execution plans and to execute more queries in parallel.

To showcase the power of new hardware platforms for SQL Managed Instance, we created a simple environment using a well-known TPC-H 300 GB database, and ran two tests:

  1. Single TPC-H query returning a large data set
  2. Simulated workload with 15 instances of a large TPC-H query executed in parallel

We executed these two tests against three different SQL Managed Instances:

Performance Testing Results

 

For test #1, the size of our chosen query was such that even 56 GB of memory available in the premium-series was not enough to avoid the data spilling to temp DB, so the query ran only slightly faster relative to standard-series (42 sec vs 43 sec). However, the same query completed in just 26 seconds on the memory-optimized premium series since the system had enough memory to avoid spilling to temp DB.

For test #2, the instances running on premium-series hardware were able to execute the same workload significantly faster since it was possible to execute more queries in parallel (thanks to more memory).

We are planning to publish additional performance benchmarks soon, so stay tuned for more information in this space.

 

How to participate in the preview

We’re launching this as a limited public preview since the new premium-series hardware generations will initially be available only in these specific Azure regions:

Region

Premium-series

Memory optimized premium-series

Central US

Yes

 

East US

Yes

 

East US 2

Yes

Yes

North Europe

 

Yes

West Europe

Yes

Yes

West US

 

Yes

West US 2

Yes

Yes

Azure regions where preview of new HW generations is available as of 11/2/2021

 

We are working diligently to expand the list of supported regions over the next several months, so please consult this documentation page for the latest information on supported regions.

If you’re in one of the supported regions, there is no need to sign up. You can start using the new premium-series hardware today!

 

Create your first SQL Managed Instance with premium-series hardware

The easiest way to create your first instance with premium-series hardware is via Azure Portal. The updated customer experience looks like this:

Azure Portal experience

 

In addition to standard-series (Gen 5) hardware generation, there are now two more choices available for the premium-series hardware generations (subject to regional availability, as explained above). Selecting one of the premium-series hardware generations will allow the “Storage in GB” slider to go to 5.5 TB (premium-series) or to 16 TB (memory-optimized premium-series). 

The support for Azure CLI and Power Shell will be available soon.

 

Reduce your costs for the memory-intensive workloads

Allowing more flexibility for workloads that need large amounts of memory but don’t require lots of CPU power was a frequent ask from some of our largest customers. These workloads often had to provision more vCores than necessary just to get the required amount of memory, which pushed the total price up linearly. With the premium-series hardware generations we are addressing this ask.

Both premium-series hardware generations offer better value in terms of total cost per memory, providing a significant cost saving for memory-intensive workloads:

 

Premium-series

Memory optimized premium-series

Memory per vCore ratio

(relative to standard-series)

1.4x

2.7x

Price per vCore

(relative to standard-series)

1.15x

1.61x

Memory amount per $$ spent

(relative to standard-series)

1.22x
22% better value

1.68x

68% better value

Comparison of memory costs across the SQL Managed Instance hardware generations

 

It’s important to note that premium-series hardware generations are only affecting the price for the vCore portion of your overall costs. The price for SQL licenses, reserved instance storage and backup storage stays the same irrespective of which hardware generation you are using.

We have some additional great news to share – the instances using new premium-series hardware generations will be free of charge in the month of November of 2021 (i.e., during the first month of the preview). Starting from December 1st, 2021, we will start charging listed prices for these instances. For more details, please see the SQL Managed Instance pricing page.

 

Gen 5 hardware generation is being renamed to standard-series (Gen 5)

If you read the entire article, you’ve probably noticed that we’re renaming the Gen 5 hardware generation to “standard-series (Gen 5)”.

Please note that this change applies only to Azure Portal and the supporting documentation – if you are using the REST API or an ARM template to create your standard-series (Gen 5) managed instances, your existing scripts will continue to work. We may announce a full formal rename of Gen 5 later.

 

Summary

In this article, we introduced the new premium-series hardware generations that make Azure SQL Managed Instance a great fit for more of your high-performance and memory-intensive database applications.

Next steps:

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