I’m excited to share our latest updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our resolution for high-scale price effectivity within the cloud.
I’m excited to share our latest updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our resolution for high-scale price effectivity within the cloud. Whether or not you’re in search of a seamless migration of your SAN surroundings 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 providing you with the optimum price-performance ratio on your workloads.
With the SAN-like useful resource hierarchy, you possibly can provision assets on the storage stage and dynamically distribute these assets to satisfy the calls for of numerous workloads throughout databases like SQL and Oracle, digital desktop infrastructure (VDIs), and enterprise purposes. It helps a mess of compute choices, together with workloads working on Azure VMware Resolution, containerized purposes (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 techniques and the pliability of Cloud.
Because the common availability (GA) launch of Azure Elastic SAN in early 2024, we have now launched varied new capabilities that allow you to combine extra workloads, just a few of which I need to spotlight on this weblog.
Enhanced resiliency, scalability, and ease to empower mission-critical workloads
Now we have launched the general public preview of autoscale for capability. Elastic SAN is the primary block storage resolution within the cloud to assist autoscaling. This may 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 working out of storage relatively than needing to actively monitor whether or not your storage is reaching its limits. With autoscaling, you possibly can scale up on demand, so there’s 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 accountable for your whole price. It’s a characteristic that matches in properly with our theme of enhancing the convenience of storage administration.
Now we have additionally made snapshot assist on Elastic SAN typically accessible. 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 could be both full or incremental snapshots of your knowledge, and you’ll restore your volumes from both of those snapshots in case it is advisable to get well from a catastrophe.
Moreover, we have now enabled CRC safety that can assist you keep the integrity of your knowledge by offering CRC32C checksum verification. If enabled on the consumer aspect, Elastic SAN helps checksum verification on the quantity group stage. This may trigger connections that don’t have CRC32C set for each header and knowledge digests to be rejected, to stop unintended errors throughout communication or storage of information.
All of that is backed by our revealed availability SLA of 99.99%, which covers mission important workloads working on Elastic SAN. That is what is going to can help you keep your peace of thoughts whereas working these workloads.
Internet hosting SQL on Azure Digital Machines (VMs) with Elastic SAN
Now we have devoted ourselves to making sure that the SQL expertise on Elastic SAN has been totally validated and optimized for price financial savings. Now we have verified that you could reliably use Elastic SAN on your clustered workloads like SQL FCI. That is particularly useful when paired with ZRS (zone-redundant storage) as you possibly can guarantee zonal redundancy on 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 could get the efficiency you want whereas concurrently enhancing your whole price of possession with options like dynamic efficiency allocation. The efficiency you provision on the SAN stage is shared throughout all of the SAN volumes you create, and since your entire workloads gained’t peak on the identical time, you possibly can keep away from provisioning for the full peak efficiency goal of all of your workloads by using this dynamic efficiency allocation. This helps with price discount as you not must provision on your peak efficiency targets.
Diminished whole price of operations (TCO) for Azure VMware Resolution with Elastic SAN
Azure Elastic SAN is now accessible as a storage choice 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 choice, 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. By utilizing VMFS datastores backed by Azure Elastic SAN, you possibly can broaden your storage with an Azure deployed, fully-managed and VMware Licensed storage space community as an alternative of scaling extra native storage nodes within the cluster. Moreover, Elastic SAN is the one Azure block storage providing with ZRS capabilities that VMware clients can leverage. ZRS ensures excessive availability and resiliency by storing three copies of every SAN in three distinct and bodily remoted storage clusters throughout completely different Azure availability zones.
Clients who’re leveraging Azure VMware Resolution for catastrophe restoration use circumstances or internet hosting capability intensive workloads, can profit from a extra cost-efficient, extensible storage resolution. As an example, you can get up a AVS cluster because the secondary website for on-premises VMware surroundings, and replicate knowledge into Elastic SAN whereas maintaining minimal cluster footprint. At $0.06-0.08 per GiB monthly (primarily based on present pricing in East US1), Azure Elastic SAN is essentially the most price environment friendly per GiB storage choice for AVS, whereas nonetheless providing scalable efficiency for a wide range of use circumstances—and it may be deployed and related straight from the Azure portal, making it an built-in and straightforward expertise.
Enabling cloud-native workloads on Elastic SAN
For patrons constructing their purposes within the cloud, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the brand new VM. Azure Container Storage is Azure’s newest resolution to simplify and provide complete persistent storage administration for stateful containers. Out there as a simple add-on to your AKS cluster, one of many backing storage choices you need to use by way of Azure Container Storage is Elastic SAN. Azure Container Storage enables you to provision persistent volumes (PVs) inside a single Elastic SAN, sharing the efficiency accessible 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 may also be used with ZRS enabled, which affords enhanced resiliency on 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 along with your cluster. With Azure Container Storage, persistent quantity orchestration and coordination of your Elastic SAN by way of your AKS cluster is totally 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 working into capability limitations.
Getting began with Azure Elastic SAN
As all the time, there’s extra to come back. Our roadmap for the yr forward includes increasing Elastic SANs current backup and catastrophe restoration performance, increasing our regionally redundant storage (LRS) and ZRS footprint into new areas, and serving to clients obtain even decrease latencies and better efficiency. For now, you possibly can deploy an Elastic SAN2 by following our directions on the best way to get began or discuss with our documentation to be taught extra. In case you have any questions or suggestions, be at liberty to succeed in out to the PM workforce at AzElasticSAN-Ex@microsoft.com, and somebody from our workforce can be completely satisfied to help.
1You will discover the freshest pricing on our pricing web page.
2 For an inventory of obtainable areas please discuss with our documentation.
