AZ520805 - Public Preview: Instant Access Snapshots for Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disks Storage

Announcing the Public Preview of Instant Access Snapshots for Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disks. This new capability enables you to restored new disks immediately after creating snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra disks. Restored disks deliver high performance instantly, while data hydration continues rapidly in the background.  

Common Scenarios 

Instant Access Snapshots accelerate backup and recovery workflows, enabling faster environment refreshes and rapid scaling. Common use cases include:  

• Create instant backups before software updates and revert quickly if needed.  
• Quickly scale stateful applications by creating multiple copies of primary data for new instances, such as adding read-only SQL Server replicas. 
• Rapid nightly refresh of training or testing environments from the production.  

Pricing  

• Public Preview: No additional charges apply when using Instant Access snapshots. Standard billing for disks and snapshots remains unchanged.  

• Post General Availability (GA): Two charges will apply:   

• Storage Charge: Billed only for the additional storage space consumed by Instant Access Snapshots, based on data changes on the source disk after the snapshot is created.   

• Restore Charge: A one-time fee applies for each disk restored from an Instant Access Snapshot, calculated based on the disk’s provisioned size at the time of restore. 

Get started by creating Instant Access Snapshots for your Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disks here.