Need details about applications that are running on Windows Azure

Question

I have an application which requires large amount of data storage (say some PB) and computing resources. Instead of going for clusters, I am planning to propose to use Windows Azure Cloud for this application. I have gone through white papers of Windows Azure and have collected some details about Azure. But I feel that is not substantial. I need to do some case study about applications that are running on the azure and that uses azure storage efficiently. I looked for several research paper in related to performance of the applications in Windows Azure. But as Azure was quite new, I wasn't able to find any.

Now, I am looking for some white papers/details regarding application that uses azure storage to substantiate my proposal. I also need to understand the windows azure storage architecture and virtual machine architecture.

Do anyone know some research papers or details or blogs or something related to these topics.

Answer 1

As every new technology in Microsoft, azure has a lot of documentation on the web for the beta release of windows azure and a few for the current release, also early adopters don’t tend to write a lot. The documentation I‘ve read so far helped me a lot to understand azure:

Windows Azure Table – Programming Table Storage

Windows Azure Blob – Programming Blob Storage

Windows Azure Queue - Programming Queue Storage

Case studies

Answer 2

Windows Azure storage allows 100TB per Subscription. A person/company may have any number of subscriptions. I think the harder problem isn't the data size, but the data movement.

Getting 100TB into Azure will take a while, PB 10x longer.

So long as the access keys are available (or the storage allows anonymous access) compute resources running under any subscription can access any storage.

Answer 3

The purpose of this site is to present the results of regularly running benchmarks on the Windows Azure platform. These benchmarks are intended to assist you in architecting and deploying your research applications and services on Azure. Included in the benchmark suite are tests of data throughput rates, response times, and capacity. Each benchmark is run against a variety of test cases designed to reflect common use scenarios for Azure development.

http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx