Increasing Azure SQL Server Performance
The latest Azure Ev5 series VMs provides up to three times an increase in remote storage performance compared with previous generations: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/increase-remote-storage-performance-with-azure-ebsv5-vms-now-generally-available/.
For larger scale Tachyon environments, achieving the best storage throughput provides the best performance for long running data consolidation operations.
In addition, the latest Ev5 Series VMs support disk busting which provides the ability to boost disk storage IOPS and MB/s performance: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disk-bursting
On-demand disk bursting in Azure is only available for premium disks of 1TB in size or greater (P30), but by enabling this on SQL data disk(s), allows you to achieve the maximum storage throughput available to the VM on high-intensity operations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-enable-bursting.