Azure Storage Updates

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This has been an eventful week in terms of cloud storage, with two significant announcements from the Windows Azure team:

On June 25th, SQL Azure Service Update 3 (SU3) became available, with the following features that had been announced at TechEd 2010 (or before)

    • Business database size has increased from 10GB to 50GB, priced in increments of 10GB
    • Two tiers of the Web version are now available as well (<= 1GB, and <= 5GB)
    • Geometry, Geography, and HierarchyID types (based on the SQL CLR) are now supported

On July 1st, users of the the Content Delivery Network (CDN) are now being billed for data transfers ($0.15/GB in the US) and transactions ($0.01/10,000).  These charges are for the transfer of data from the edge-point to the consumer.  Charges for moving the data from the actual Azure data center to the edge-point follow the normal Azure storage rates, which are actually the same as the CDN rates for the US.

Don’t forget too that SQL Azure Data Sync (announced at TechEd 2010) is available as a developer preview at SQLAzureLabs.com.

On a slightly related note, I just published a screencast of my Northeast Roadshow presentation from March(!) covering Azure storage, SQL Azure, and WCF Data Services – with some updates (of course) given the announcements since then.

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