What’s new in Azure Elastic SAN

I’m excited to share our latest updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our answer for high-scale price effectivity within the cloud.

I’m excited to share our latest updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our answer for high-scale price effectivity within the cloud. Whether or not you’re on the lookout for a seamless migration of your SAN atmosphere or trying to consolidate current workloads throughout the cloud, this enterprise-class providing stands out by serving to you simplify your storage administration expertise and supplying you with the optimum price-performance ratio to your workloads.

With the SAN-like useful resource hierarchy, you possibly can provision assets on the storage degree and dynamically distribute these assets to fulfill the calls for of various workloads throughout databases like SQL and Oracle, digital desktop infrastructure (VDIs), and enterprise functions. It helps a large number of compute choices, together with workloads operating on Azure VMware Resolution, containerized functions (by way of Azure Container Storage), and digital machines. Past that, it delivers cloud-native advantages with scale on demand, policy-based service administration, and cloud-native safety enforcements throughout encryption and community entry. It’s an answer that mixes the effectivity at scale of on-premises SAN methods and the flexibleness of Cloud. 

For the reason that common availability (GA) launch of Azure Elastic SAN in early 2024, we now have launched numerous new capabilities that allow you to combine extra workloads, a couple of of which I need to spotlight on this weblog.

Enhanced resiliency, scalability, and ease to empower mission-critical workloads

We now have launched the general public preview of autoscale for capability. Elastic SAN is the primary block storage answer within the cloud to help autoscaling. This can assist prevent time by simplifying administration of the Elastic SAN, as you possibly can set a coverage for autoscaling your capability if you find yourself operating out of storage fairly than needing to actively observe whether or not your storage is reaching its limits. With autoscaling, you possibly can scale up on demand, so there may be much less of a must provision additional storage simply in case, serving to you decrease your month-to-month invoice. Plus, it is possible for you to to set the precise increments by which your SAN(s) will develop, so that you keep in charge of your whole price. It’s a characteristic that matches in nicely with our theme of bettering the benefit of storage administration. 

We now have additionally made snapshot help on Elastic SAN usually obtainable. Now you can take immediate point-in-time backups of the state of your workloads with Elastic SAN quantity snapshots. You’ll be able to export these quantity snapshots to managed disk snapshots for hardening functions. Snapshots may be both full or incremental snapshots of your information, and you’ll restore your volumes from both of those snapshots in case it’s good to recuperate from a catastrophe.

Moreover, we now have enabled CRC safety that will help you preserve the integrity of your information by offering CRC32C checksum verification. If enabled on the consumer facet, Elastic SAN helps checksum verification on the quantity group degree. This can trigger connections that don’t have CRC32C set for each header and information digests to be rejected, to stop unintentional errors throughout communication or storage of information. 

All of that is backed by our revealed availability SLA of 99.99%, which covers mission essential workloads operating on Elastic SAN. That is what is going to let you preserve your peace of thoughts whereas operating these workloads. 

Internet hosting SQL on Azure Digital Machines (VMs) with Elastic SAN

We now have devoted ourselves to making sure that the SQL expertise on Elastic SAN has been absolutely validated and optimized for price financial savings. We now have verified that you may reliably use Elastic SAN to your clustered workloads like SQL FCI. That is particularly useful when paired with ZRS (zone-redundant storage) as you possibly can guarantee zonal redundancy to your failover clusters. Moreover, to help with storage and workload consolidation of multi-SQL databases hosted on Elastic SAN, we constructed out Elastic SAN in such a method that you may get the efficiency you want whereas concurrently bettering your whole price of possession with options like dynamic efficiency allocation. The efficiency you provision on the SAN degree is shared throughout all of the SAN volumes you create, and since your entire workloads received’t peak on the similar time, you possibly can keep away from provisioning for the overall peak efficiency goal of all of your workloads by using this dynamic efficiency allocation. This helps with price discount as you not must provision to your peak efficiency targets. 

Decreased whole price of operations (TCO) for Azure VMware Resolution with Elastic SAN

Azure Elastic SAN is now obtainable as a storage possibility for all Azure VMware Resolution SKUs, together with the all new AV64 SKUs. As a result of Azure VMware Resolution helps attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage possibility, you possibly can connect Elastic SAN volumes to an Azure VMware Resolution cluster of your selection and current them as Digital Machine File System (VMFS) datastores. Through the use of VMFS datastores backed by Azure Elastic SAN, you possibly can develop your storage with an Azure deployed, fully-managed and VMware Licensed storage space community as a substitute of scaling extra native storage nodes within the cluster. Moreover, Elastic SAN is the one Azure block storage providing with ZRS capabilities that VMware prospects can leverage. ZRS ensures excessive availability and resiliency by storing three copies of every SAN in three distinct and bodily remoted storage clusters throughout totally different Azure availability zones.

Clients who’re leveraging Azure VMware Resolution for catastrophe restoration use instances or internet hosting capability intensive workloads, can profit from a extra cost-efficient, extensible storage answer. As an illustration, you may rise up a AVS cluster because the secondary website for on-premises VMware atmosphere, and replicate information into Elastic SAN whereas maintaining minimal cluster footprint. At $0.06-0.08 per GiB monthly (based mostly on present pricing in East US¹), Azure Elastic SAN is probably the most price environment friendly per GiB storage possibility for AVS, whereas nonetheless providing scalable efficiency for a wide range of use instances—and it may be deployed and related straight from the Azure portal, making it an built-in and simple expertise.

Enabling cloud-native workloads on Elastic SAN

For patrons constructing their functions within the cloud, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the brand new VM. Azure Container Storage is Azure’s newest answer to simplify and provide complete persistent storage administration for stateful containers. Obtainable as a simple add-on to your AKS cluster, one of many backing storage choices you should use by way of Azure Container Storage is Elastic SAN. Azure Container Storage allows you to provision persistent volumes (PVs) inside a single Elastic SAN, sharing the efficiency obtainable in the identical SAN throughout a number of PVs. As a result of Elastic SAN makes use of iSCSI protocol to hook up with AKS clusters, conventional VM-based limitations on the variety of persistent volumes you possibly can connect per node are overcome, reaching new heights of scale. Azure Container Storage will also be used with ZRS enabled, which provides enhanced resiliency to your workloads. 

Conventional storage administration for stateful containers meant provisioning storage assets, deploying PVs inside your cluster, and manually managing the connection and scaling of the storage useful resource together with your cluster. With Azure Container Storage, persistent quantity orchestration and coordination of your Elastic SAN by way of your AKS cluster is absolutely managed for you. With the preview of autoscaling on Elastic SAN, storage administration at scale is even easier by way of Azure Container Storage. By setting your autoscale coverage, you don’t want to fret about operating into capability limitations. 

Getting began with Azure Elastic SAN

As all the time, there may be extra to come back. Our roadmap for the yr forward entails increasing Elastic SANs current backup and catastrophe restoration performance, increasing our domestically redundant storage (LRS) and ZRS footprint into new areas, and serving to prospects obtain even decrease latencies and better efficiency. For now, you possibly can deploy an Elastic SAN² by following our directions on how you can get began or consult with our documentation to be taught extra. You probably have any questions or suggestions, be at liberty to succeed in out to the PM crew at Az*************@mi*******.com, and somebody from our crew can be completely satisfied to help. 

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¹You will discover the hottest pricing on our pricing web page. 

² For a listing of accessible areas please consult with our documentation.