Microsoft Get Big: G-Series VMs

Earlier this week, at its State of the Union for the Cloud in San Francisco, Microsoft made a bevy of announcements. In Microsoft Cloud Platform System, Powered by Dell, is Azure in a Box, I've already covered one piece of the news, but promised I'd parse out each announcement to clearly show the value in what Microsoft revealed.

In this post, I'd like to focus on the G-Series VMs that Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, talked about.

Microsoft's Azure virtual machine capacities have grown significantly over time to allow businesses to do more things, more efficiently. Staring with the A-series, and then releasing the D-series just in September of this year, the goal, of course, is to offer virtual solutions that deliver load-balancing, auto-scaling, or capacity for memory-intensive applications.  Offered in both Basic and Standard versions, companies can take advantage of the different tiers based on needs and economics. The Basic tier is generally considered for dev/test workloads, while the Standard tier is for production workloads.

Each new series release comes with improvements, including better CPUs, more RAM, and bigger disk sizes.

The G-series announced on Monday, takes Microsoft's VM offering to a completely new level. The G-series provides even more memory and more local Solid State Drive (SSD) storage than any of Microsoft's current Public Cloud offerings and is intended as a computational beast. It also includes Intel's latest Xeon E5 v3 processor family.

For effect, compare the proposed G-series sizes to the last D-series generation:

Incidentally, Microsoft has yet to stamp a price on the G-series, but have only stated that the exact prices will be announced when the VM sizes are released for general availability.