Today Microsoft released their G-series instances in Azure. This new instance is using a newer Intel Xeon based CPU and also with local SSD disk.
“G-Series VM Sizes availability
Today, we’re announcing the General Availability release of a new series of VM sizes for Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud. This extraordinary performance will allow customers to deploy very large and demanding enterprise applications.” and we can have up to 64 data disks as well. http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/08/azure-is-now-bigger-faster-more-open-and-more-secure/
So still we have a local SSD drive and Intel XEON CPU how does it perform compared to a regular A-instance ?
I did some regular disk benchmarking with HD tach tune.
Read benchmarking test on G-series SSD based instance
Read benchmarking test on A-series HDD based instance
So after comparison we can see that the CPU usage is lower on the Intel based instances because it is much more efficient then the AMD based instance. We can also see that is has better performance then a regular HDD based. If we do a similar test on a attached data disk on both instances
G-series instance data disk READ
A-series instance data disk READ
We can see that the results are almost the same but the CPU usage is again lower. Now even if this instance can up to 64 data disks, don’t think of using it with storage spaces yet, wait until Storage premium available 