This article originally appeared at The WHIR

In order to support applications that are both compute and storage intensive in the public cloud, Microsoft launched a new variant of its G-series VMs, called the GS-series on Wednesday. GS-series offers the compute power of G-series with the performance of premium storage.

According to Microsoft, GS-series are ideal for applications that are both compute and storage intensive, including relational databases like SQL Server and MySQL, noSQL databases like MongoDB and data warehouses. The GS-series can also come in handy when scaling up the performance of enterprise applications like Microsoft Exchangeand Dynamics, the company said.

The announcement comes as Microsoft, along with CSC and AWS, have won a $108 million cloud computing contract with the Federal Aviation Administration.

Microsoft launched its G-series earlier this year to offer more memory and SSD space than other VM sizes in the public cloud. Over the past three months, G-series has seen a more than 50 percent growth in usage.

Also on Wednesday, Microsoft lowered the prices on its D-series and DS-series instances by as much as 27 percent, going into effect on Oct. 1.

The company also launched a new diagnostic capability for VMs – the ability to see serial and console output from a running virtual machine, Microsoft Director of Program Management, Azure, Corey Sanders said in a blog post.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/microsoft-launches-new-azure-vms-for-compute-storage-intensive-applications