Microsoft Azure presents it’s latest developments for Azure Elastic SAN, it cloud-based solution for large-scale cost effectiveness. This enterprise-class solution stands out by helping you streamline your storage management experience and providing you with the best price-performance ratio for your workloads, regardless of whether you’re looking to consolidate current workloads in the cloud or migrate your SAN environment seamlessly.
To accommodate the demands of various workloads spanning databases such as SQL and Oracle, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDIs), and business applications, you can supply resources at the storage level and dynamically distribute them using the SAN-like resource hierarchy. Workloads running on Azure VMware Solution, containerised apps (via Azure Container Storage), and virtual machines are just a few of the many compute alternatives it supports. In addition, it offers cloud-native security enforcements for network access and encryption, policy-based service management, and scale on demand. It is a solution that blends the freedom of the cloud with the scalability and efficiency of on-premises SAN systems.
Microsoft Azure want to highlight a few of the new features that it has added to Azure Elastic SAN since its general availability (GA) release in early 2024. These features allow you to integrate more workloads.
Enhanced resiliency, scalability, and simplicity to empower mission-critical workloads
The public preview of autoscale for capacity is available. The first cloud-based block storage system with autoscaling capabilities is Azure Elastic SAN. This will help you save time by making it easier to manage the Elastic SAN. Instead of manually checking storage limits, use a policy to scale capacity when storage is low. Scaling up as needed using autoscaling reduces storage needs and monthly expenditures. You can also define SAN growth rates to control costs. It is a feature that aligns nicely with their goal of making storage management easier.
Additionally, it has made Azure Elastic SAN snapshot support widely accessible. Elastic SAN volume snapshots now allow you to take immediate point-in-time backups of the status of your workloads. For hardening, you can export these volume snapshots to managed disc snapshots. You can take full or incremental snapshots of your data, and in the event of a disaster, you may restore your volumes from either of these snapshots.
Additionally, by offering CRC32C checksum checking, it has activated CRC protection to assist you in preserving the integrity of your data. Elastic SAN allows checksum checking at the volume group level if it is enabled on the client side. In order to avoid unintentional mistakes during data storage or communication, this will result in the rejection of connections that do not have CRC32C configured for both header and data digests.
It stated availability SLA of 99.99%, which includes mission-critical workloads operating on Azure Elastic SAN, supports all of this. While managing these tasks, this is what will enable you to keep your peace of mind.
Hosting SQL on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) with Elastic SAN
Microsoft Azure has committed to making sure that the SQL experience on Azure Elastic SAN has been thoroughly examined and cost-effectively optimised. It has confirmed that Elastic SAN is a dependable solution for clustered workloads, such as SQL FCI. When used with ZRS (zone-redundant storage), this is particularly beneficial because it allows you to guarantee zonal redundancy for your failover clusters. In order to help with the storage and workload consolidation of multi-SQL databases hosted on Elastic SAN, it also designed Elastic SAN with features like dynamic performance allocation that allow you to get the performance you require while also lowering your total cost of ownership.
Because your workloads won’t all peak at the same time, you may avoid provisioning for the whole peak performance objective of all your workloads by using this dynamic performance allocation. The performance you provision at the SAN level is shared across all the SAN volumes you establish. Because you are no longer required to make provisions for your peak performance targets, this aids in cost savings.
Reduced total cost of operations (TCO) for Azure VMware Solution with Elastic SAN
All Azure VMware Solution SKUs, including the brand-new AV64 SKUs, now have the option to use Azure Elastic SAN for storage. You can attach Elastic SAN volumes to any Azure VMware Solution cluster and display them as Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores as Azure VMware Solution allows attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage option.
Instead of adding more local storage nodes to the cluster, you may increase your storage capacity using an Azure-deployed, fully-managed, and VMware-certified storage area network by utilising VMFS datastores supported by Azure Elastic SAN. Furthermore, the only Azure block storage solution with ZRS capabilities available to VMware clients is Elastic SAN. By keeping three copies of each SAN in three separate, physically separated storage clusters spread across various Azure availability zones, ZRS guarantees high availability and resilience.
Customers can take advantage of a more affordable, expandable storage option if they are using Azure VMware option for disaster recovery use cases or hosting applications that require a lot of capacity. To replicate data onto Elastic SAN with a small cluster footprint, for example, you may set up an AVS cluster as the backup location for an on-premises VMware environment. Azure Elastic SAN is the most economical per GiB storage option for AVS, with prices ranging from $0.06-0.08 per GiB per month (based on current pricing in East US1). It also offers scalable performance for a range of use cases and can be deployed and connected directly from the Azure portal, making it a seamless and integrated experience.
Enabling cloud-native workloads on Elastic SAN
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the latest virtual machine (VM) for clients developing their apps in the cloud. The newest offering from Azure to streamline and provide all-inclusive persistent storage management for stateful containers is Azure Container Storage. One of the backing storage solutions that you may utilise with Azure Container Storage is Elastic SAN, which is a straightforward add-on to your AKS cluster. You can share the performance available in a single Azure Elastic SAN across numerous PVs by provisioning persistent volumes (PVs) using Azure Container Storage.
Traditional VM-based restrictions on the amount of persistent volumes you may attach per node are removed by Azure Elastic SAN which connects to AKS clusters using the iSCSI protocol, enabling you to achieve unprecedented scalability. You may also use Azure Container Storage with ZRS enabled, which gives your workloads more resilience.
Provisioning storage resources, setting up PVs inside your cluster, and manually controlling the connection and scalability of the storage resource with your cluster were all part of traditional storage management for stateful containers. Azure Container Storage takes care of all the coordination and persistent volume orchestration for your Azure Elastic SAN through your AKS cluster. Storage management at scale is made much easier with Azure Container Storage’s preview of autoscaling on Elastic SAN. Setting your autoscale policy eliminates the concern of encountering capacity constraints.
Getting started with Azure Elastic SAN
There’s more to come, as usual. It’s goals for the upcoming year include helping clients get even lower latencies and better performance, growing locally redundant storage (LRS) and ZRS footprint into new locations, and enhancing Elastic SAN’s current backup and disaster recovery capabilities.