Microsoft Corp. today previewed new Azure cloud instances geared towards large, demanding analytics applications that require a lot of memory to store the data they’re crunching.

The update centers on the company’s M family of RAM-optimized virtual machines, or computers emulated in software. Microsoft is expanding the lineup with new instances that offer as much as 12 terabytes of memory, Azure corporate vice president Corey Sanders detailed in a blog post. He said this is the most offered by any public cloud service.  

One way to put so much RAM to use is running an in-memory store, a type of database that maximizes performance by doing all of its processing in memory rather than going to disk drives. Sanders named SAP SE’s popular HANA database in particular as a good fit for the new instances.

The platform is a major focus of today’s update. Alongside the 12-terabyte instances, Microsoft announced an upgrade to Azure Large, an offering specifically optimized for HANA that lets companies deploy the platform on bare-metal infrastructure, which is servers with no software preinstalled on them. Enterprises will now have access to five new configuration options with between 6 and a hefty 24 terabytes of memory.

Over on the opposite end of the price scale, Microsoft debuted new entry-level M instances with as little as 192 gigabytes of RAM. These small VMs make it easier to scale an environment up and down as operational demands change. The smaller the increment at which memory may be provisioned, the greater the granularity with which a company can optimize its deployment.

Rounding out the update is a new cloud storage option called Standard SSDs. Microsoft is positioning it as a lower-cost alternative to the solid-state drives that have been available for Azure instances so far, which are on the higher end of the spectrum as far as price is concerned. 

Standard SSDs are intended for workloads such as web servers that need to balance performance with cost. They provide a maximum throughput of 60 megabits per second compared with the up to 250 offered by the existing flash drives, which Microsoft has rebranded to Premium SSDs on the occasion.

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