What’s new in Azure Elastic SAN

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

I’m excited to share our latest updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our resolution for high-scale value effectivity within the cloud. Whether or not you’re on the lookout for a seamless migration of your SAN surroundings or seeking to consolidate current workloads inside 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 in your workloads.

With the SAN-like useful resource hierarchy, you possibly can provision sources on the storage degree and dynamically distribute these sources to satisfy 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 working on Azure VMware Answer, 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 normal availability (GA) launch of Azure Elastic SAN in early 2024, we’ve 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 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 end up working out of storage somewhat 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’s much less of a must provision further 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 complete value. It’s a function that matches in nicely with our theme of bettering the benefit of storage administration.

We now have additionally made snapshot assist on Elastic SAN typically accessible. Now you can take instantaneous point-in-time backups of the state of your workloads with Elastic SAN quantity snapshots. You possibly can export these quantity snapshots to managed disk snapshots for hardening functions. Snapshots might be both full or incremental snapshots of your information, and you may restore your volumes from both of those snapshots in case it is advisable get better from a catastrophe.

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

All of that is backed by our printed availability SLA of 99.99%, which covers mission important workloads working on Elastic SAN. That is what is going to mean you can preserve your peace of thoughts whereas working 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 value financial savings. We now have verified that you could reliably use Elastic SAN in your clustered workloads like SQL FCI. That is particularly useful when paired with ZRS (zone-redundant storage) as you possibly can guarantee zonal redundancy in 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 approach that you could get the efficiency you want whereas concurrently bettering your complete value 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 whole workloads gained’t peak on the identical time, you possibly can keep away from provisioning for the whole peak efficiency goal of all of your workloads by using this dynamic efficiency allocation. This helps with value discount as you not must provision in your peak efficiency targets.

Diminished complete value of operations (TCO) for Azure VMware Answer with Elastic SAN

Azure Elastic SAN is now accessible as a storage choice for all Azure VMware Answer SKUs, together with the all new AV64 SKUs. As a result of Azure VMware Answer helps attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage choice, you possibly can connect Elastic SAN volumes to an Azure VMware Answer 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 develop 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 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 completely different Azure availability zones.

Clients who’re leveraging Azure VMware Answer for catastrophe restoration use instances or internet hosting capability intensive workloads, can profit from a extra cost-efficient, extensible storage resolution. As an example, you possibly can rise up a AVS cluster because the secondary website for on-premises VMware surroundings, and replicate information into Elastic SAN whereas retaining minimal cluster footprint. At $0.06-0.08 per GiB per 30 days (primarily based on present pricing in East US¹), Azure Elastic SAN is essentially the most value environment friendly per GiB storage choice 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 straightforward 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 resolution to simplify and supply 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 Azure Container Storage is Elastic SAN. Azure Container Storage permits 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 presents enhanced resiliency in your workloads.

Conventional storage administration for stateful containers meant provisioning storage sources, 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 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 return. Our roadmap for the yr forward entails increasing Elastic SANs current backup and catastrophe restoration performance, increasing our regionally 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 find out how to get began or consult with our documentation to study extra. You probably have any questions or suggestions, be happy to achieve out to the PM workforce at AzElasticSAN-Ex@microsoft.com, and somebody from our workforce shall be joyful to help.