When it comes to performance, you can decide between standard or a premium storage account. For most workloads, standard accounts are more than suitable, but in some cases, more I/O-intensive applications need very fast storage. For this use case, the premium storage account was introduced. Premium storage is fully backed by SSD tiers and provides high-performance and low-latency storage.

Premium storage can currently only be used for virtual disks used in VMs (page blobs). The performance property can't be changed after storage account creation, but it's possible to migrate VMs from the standard to premium storage tier.

Depending on the machine size, it's possible to attach up to 64 disks to a VM (Standard_GS5). A Standard_GS5-sized machine supports up to 80,000 uncached input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 2,000 MBps disk throughput.

Microsoft examples of enterprise applications that may need premium storage are—Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Exchange Server, SharePoint Farms, SAP Business Suite, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis.