Microsoft lowers Windows Azure storage prices to better fight Amazon & Google

Microsoft said it will soon drop prices by as much as 28 percent on its Windows Azure cloud storage, a move to help it compete with cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and other competitors.

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Effective Dec. 12, prices will drop as much as 28 percent depending on how much storage you use. This follows a 12 percent price drop it put in place in March.

Steven Martin, general manager for Windows Azure business planning, writes:

Today we are happy to announce another price reduction for Windows Azure Storage by as much as 28%, effective on December 12th. This follows our March 8th 2012 reduction of 12% furthering our commitment to best overall value in the industry.

Reducing prices is only part of the story; we’ve also added more value to our storage offerings in a number of ways. Our Geo Redundant Storage continues to lead the market in durability with more than 400 miles of separation between replicas. We recently announced deployment of a flat network for Windows Azure across all of our datacenters to provide very high bandwidth network connectivity for storage clients which significantly enhances scenarios like MapReduce, HPC, and others. We also announced increased scalability targets for Windows Azure Storage and continue to invest in improving bandwidth between compute and storage.

Microsoft Azure has more than 4 trillion objects stored inside. This is on top of handling an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, with a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

While the Azure price drops are nice, Amazon is still the clear leader in the space. And then you’ve Google not too far behind trying to get attention. Both Amazon and Google lowered prices last week too.