The start of a brand new 12 months typically prompts reflection together with planning for the long run. On the forefront of our priorities lies the dedication to boost the Azure platform and its ecosystem, gasoline groundbreaking AI options, and facilitate seamless migrations to the cloud. We obtain this by purpose-built storage options tailor-made to satisfy the distinctive calls for of your workloads.
2023 was an emblematic 12 months of development for storage and information providers with AI on the prime of thoughts for a lot of prospects. Azure prospects’ total information property continued to develop, powered by the emergence of recent workloads and entry patterns. Notable Azure Storage figures embody:
- The storage platform now processes greater than 1 quadrillion (that’s 1000 trillion!) transactions a month with over 100 exabytes of information learn and written every month. Each numbers had been sharply greater in comparison with the start of 2023.
- Premium SSD v2 disks, our new general-purpose block storage tailor-made for SQL, NoSQL databases, and SAP grew capability by 100 instances.
- The entire transactions of Premium Information, our file providing for Azure Digital Desktop (AVD) and SAP, grew by greater than 100% 12 months over 12 months (YoY).
In 2023, developments and investments had been made in 5 strategic areas aligning with buyer workload patterns, cloud computing tendencies, and the evolution of AI.
Centered improvements for brand spanking new workloads
We’ve made developments in providing end-to-end options with distinctive storage capabilities, tailor-made to assist prospects carry new workloads to Azure, with out the necessity to retrofit them.
As prospects modernize purposes with Kubernetes, we have now noticed prospects’ workloads shifting from “stateless” to “stateful” workloads. Azure Container Storage is customized to satisfy the wants of internet hosting stateful workloads the place storage is tightly built-in with containers and affords excellent information administration, lifecycle administration, price-performance, and scale. Azure Container Storage is the {industry}’s first platform-managed container-native storage service within the public cloud. It affords a path to handle persistent volumes and the backend storage choices utterly by way of the Kubernetes native expertise.
Microsoft’s Azure Elastic SAN is a totally managed storage space community (SAN) service that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN within the cloud. It’s designed to handle prospects’ challenges in service administration relating to migrating a large-scale SAN equipment to cloud. We’re the primary available in the market in offering a totally managed SAN providing on cloud, with built-in cloud scale and excessive availability choices. It adopts a SAN-like hierarchy, provisioning assets on the top-level useful resource, dynamically sharing assets throughout the workloads, managing safety insurance policies on the workload stage. As well as, it permits prospects to carry new information intensive workloads to Azure VMware Answer utilizing Elastic SAN to serve the storage wants. Elastic SAN and Azure Container Storage, in public preview, showcase a paradigm shift by simplifying service administration, function constructed for cloud native storage eventualities. Common availability is deliberate for the upcoming months.
AI is main a contemporary wave of innovation powered by information. Azure Blob Storage stands on the forefront of this information explosion, offering wonderful efficiency and excessive bandwidth entry for all AI coaching wants. Azure Premium Block Blob, usually obtainable since 2019, offers extraordinarily low latency at aggressive pricing for AI and machine studying (ML), IoT and streaming analytics, and interactive workloads. We additionally launched Azure Managed Lustre in July which affords a totally managed distributed parallel file system tailor-made for top efficiency computing (HPC) and AI coaching workloads.
OneLake (which is the storage layer for Microsoft Material) is powered by the size, efficiency, and wealthy capabilities of Azure Information Lake Storage (ADLS). ADLS has been a sport changer for analytics with differentiated storage options together with native file system capabilities that allow atomic meta information operations, leading to a major efficiency enhance, particularly when used with Azure Premium Block Blob. Multi-protocol entry is one other distinctive functionality that enables prospects to work with their information utilizing quite a lot of entry protocols (together with REST, SFTP and NFS v3) eliminating information silos, pricey information motion, and duplication.
Optimizations for mission vital workloads
We proceed so as to add differentiated capabilities to allow enterprises to optimize their mission vital workloads hosted on Azure.
With the overall availability of Premium SSD v2, we have now been actively onboarding options centered on mission vital information. Gigaom highlighted the superior efficiency and lowered complete price of possession of SQL Server 2019 operating on Azure Digital Machines (VMs) with Premium SSD v2. Comparable advantages apply to different database workloads like PostgreSQL. We’ll proceed enhancing Premium SSD v2 capabilities and broaden regional protection within the upcoming 12 months.
Azure Blob Storage powers data-intensive mission vital workloads globally, together with a few of the largest AI mannequin coaching and inferencing. Cloud-native firms host exabytes of consumer-generated information and depend on the platform’s scale-out capabilities. Main retailers retailer trillions of consumer actions to energy suggestion engines and stock methods. The Chilly storage tier, launched in 2023, permits cost-efficient retention of this information.
Enterprises migrate Home windows Server workloads to the cloud for modernization, supported by enhanced Azure Information and Azure File Sync capabilities. The preview of Microsoft Entra ID (beforehand named as Azure Energetic Listing assist for Azure Information REST API) permits fashionable purposes to make use of identity-based authentication and authorization for accessing SMB file shares. Azure Information affords complete authentication assist, together with on-premises AD and Microsoft Entra ID for each Kerberos and REST. Distinctive to Azure, we additionally provide Microsoft Entra ID Kerberos authentication enabling seamless migration from on-premises Home windows servers to Azure which retains your information and permissions intact whereas eliminating complicated area be part of setups within the cloud. Enterprises migrating mission-critical purposes reminiscent of SAP and Oracle depend on Azure NetApp Information (ANF) to satisfy their efficiency and information safety necessities. In strategic partnership with NetApp, we launched the general public preview of ANF giant volumes as much as 500 TiB, addressing the wants of workloads that require bigger capability below a single namespace, reminiscent of HPC in Digital Design Automation and Oil and Fuel associated purposes, and the general public preview of Cool Entry, bettering the TCO for occasionally accessed information.
Environment friendly information migration at scale is vital for profitable cloud workload migration. We provide a complete suite of migration options. Azure Storage Mover, a totally managed information migration service, improves the general migration expertise of enormous information units. Azure File Sync permits hybrid synchronization between on-premises Home windows Servers and Azure Information. AzCopy, a command-line utility, permits fast script-based migration jobs, whereas Azure Databox facilitates offline information switch.
Increasing accomplice ecosystem
We transition buyer workloads to Azure in collaboration with our companions, who complement our platform capabilities with revolutionary options. Now we have fostered quite a few profitable strategic partnerships and are delighted to see the accomplice group investing in unique Azure options.
Qumulo introduced the following model of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service, unique to Azure and constructed to leverage Azure Blob Storage’s scale and price effectivity. This service helps exabytes of information below a single namespace, surpassing different public cloud file options, and facilitates high-scale enterprise community hooked up storage (NAS) information migration to Azure.
Commvault unveiled a purpose-built cyber resilience answer, completely on Azure. It empowers customers to foretell threats quicker, obtain clear recoveries, and speed up response instances. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
Because the launch of Pure Storage Cloud Block Storage providing on Azure in 2021, we have now partnered carefully with Pure Storage. They use distinctive Azure Storage options reminiscent of shared disks and had been early adopters of Extremely and Premium SSD v2 disk storage. Our collaboration has expanded to containers by Portworx and the Azure VMware Answer.
Apart from storage and backup companions, we collaborate with Atempo, Information Dynamics, Komprise, and Cirrus Information to ship storage migration options, offering entry to industry-leading file and block options emigrate petabytes of NAS and storage space community (SAN) information to Azure at no further cost.
Trade contributions
We actively take part in {industry} organizations reminiscent of Storage Networking Trade Affiliation (SNIA) and the Open Compute Platform (OCP), collaborating with {industry} leaders to share insights, affect requirements, and contribute to the event of revolutionary options and finest practices.
On the 2023 Storage Developer Convention, we introduced Massively Scalable Storage for Stateful Containers on Azure, emphasizing the synergy between Azure Container Storage and Elastic SAN. This mixture affords unified quantity administration throughout numerous storage backends and delivers a extremely obtainable block storage answer designed to scale to tens of millions of enter/output operations per second (IOPS) with quick pod connect and detach expertise.
At Flash Reminiscence Summit (FMS) convention we chartered the course for the way forward for flash as a HDD displacement know-how in alignment with Azure Storage long-range plans.
We’re dedicated to sustainability, striving for internet carbon-zero targets within the subsequent decade. By means of the OCP Sustainability Challenge, we offer an open framework for the datacenter {industry} to undertake finest practices for reusability and circularity and lead within the steering committee to drive progress.
Unparalleled dedication to high quality
Our major focus is on delivering a sturdy basis for our storage providers, adapting to evolving workloads just like the emergence of AI and ML. This ongoing dedication covers reliability, sturdiness, scalability, and efficiency, for our storage options whereas sustaining a low complete price of possession (TCO) for Azure prospects.
We guarantee prospects of excessive information sturdiness, backed by substantial investments in infrastructure, {hardware}, software program, and streamlined processes. Our Zone-redundant Storage (ZRS) ensures information sturdiness of at the very least 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) over a given 12 months—the best commonplace among the many main cloud service suppliers (CSPs). Notably, we’re the only cloud supplier among the many main CSPs sustaining a 0% Annual Failure Charge (AFR) with our block storage choices since launch.
Our distinctive ZRS providing offers a easy option to set up extremely obtainable options throughout three zones at a fraction of the prices. You possibly can deploy a cross-zonal AKS cluster with persistent volumes hosted on ZRS disks to make sure information sturdiness and availability throughout zonal outages. Clustered purposes like SQL failover cluster cases (FCI) leveraging Home windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) may also profit from ZRS with excessive resiliency supplied out of the field.
In a concerted effort to raise buyer assist expertise, we’ve built-in with Azure Copilot, empowering assist engineers to troubleshoot extra effectively whereas delivering high quality responses shortly. This has resulted in a noteworthy improve in buyer satisfaction scores.
In closing, 2023 has been a 12 months of profound studying and substantial progress. Discover our characteristic releases in Azure Updates. Our dedication is to empower you with Azure Storage improvements and allow the seamless execution of a various vary of workloads. We invite you to proceed trusting us as we anticipate thrilling developments in 2024!