Microsoft Azure Announces Premium VMs Powered by Intel Xeon E5

Microsoft announced the Azure GS-series of virtual machine (VM) and premium storage types designed to run the most demanding storage and compute-intensive workloads in the cloud.

The new GS-series combines the compute power of G-series with the performance of premium storage.  Powered by the Intel Xeon E5 v3 family processors, the GS-series can have up to 64TB of storage, provide 80,000 IOPs (storage I/Os per second) and deliver 2,000 MB/s of storage throughput. The GS-series offers the highest disk throughput, by more than double, of any VM offered by another hyperscale public cloud provider. Furthermore, both the G-series and GS-series offer up to 20 Gbps of network bandwidth, more than double that of the closest VMs of any hyperscale public cloud provider.

Microsoft also announced a new diagnostic capability for VMs – the ability to see serial and console output from a running Virtual Machine. This will help customers diagnose VMs that may be suffering from boot or runtime failures.

In addition, Microsoft introduced Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging, a new Service Bus tier that provides all the messaging features of Azure Service Bus queues and topics with predictable, repeatable performance and improved availability. Unlike the multitenant model used by basic and standard Service Bus tiers, the premium tier uses a micro services model to provide resource isolation and consistent performance.

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-has-the-most-powerful-vms-in-the-public-cloud/