Microsoft expands Azure scalability for Healthcare Organizations

Key Highlights: 

 Improved Scalability: Microsoft Azure now scales up to 65 million GRefs/s in a horizontally scaled ECP architecture. This marks a 171% increase from the previous Azure VM limit of 24 million GRefs/s in 2023.  

 New VM Series: This scalability is achieved using the memory and storage optimized Mbv3 (M176bs_v3) VM series leveraging Azure Ultra Disk storage. The Mbv3 series VMs are powered by 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Azure Boost, capable of scaling workloads up to 4TB of RAM and delivering higher remote disk storage performance.  

 Enhanced Storage Performance: Azure Boost enhances the storage platform, achieving 500,000 random reads/writes with Epic’s GenIO benchmarking tool on the M176bs_v3 and offers up to 10 GBps of remote disk storage bandwidth - a 2.5X increase in storage bandwidth over the previous M-series families. This advancement makes it ideal for storage throughput-intensive workloads such as relational databases and data analytics applications, particularly Epic workloads.  

 Custom VM Configuration: The Mbv3 VM sizes are specifically designed for the Epic database workloads, with options ranging from 16 to 176 vCPUs tailored for Epic’s ODB and Clarity database. These sizes offer various combinations of CPU, memory, IOPS, storage, and network throughput to meet different customer’s performance requirements, costs, and scalability needs. The new Mbv3 sizes for Epic support live migration, providing increased resiliency for healthcare organizations. For more information on Mbv3 Virtual machines, please visit here.  

 Availability regions: The enhanced VMs are currently highly available in nine regions with zonal resiliency: East US, East2 US, West2 US, West3 US, Central US, North Central US, South Central US, West EU, and North EU.  

 This milestone underscores Microsoft's commitment to providing robust and scalable solutions for critical workloads, ensuring enhanced performance and reliability for Epic EHR customers.  

Explore Epic on Azure to learn more.  

*Epic and Chronicles are trademarks of Epic Systems Corporation.