Azure Elastic San for Cloud and On-Premises Storage

Azure Elastic SAN is a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their storage needs. It allows you to create a single, unified storage pool that spans both cloud and on-premises environments.

With Azure Elastic SAN, you can easily manage your storage across multiple locations, eliminating the need for separate storage systems. This means reduced complexity and lower costs for your organization.

One of the key benefits of Azure Elastic SAN is its ability to automatically rebalance storage capacity as needed. This ensures that your storage is always optimized for performance and availability.

By leveraging the power of Azure Elastic SAN, you can say goodbye to storage silos and hello to a more agile, scalable infrastructure.

Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-based storage solution that allows you to scale your storage needs on-demand.

It's designed to provide high-performance storage for your applications, with low latency and high throughput.

Azure Elastic SAN is built on top of Azure Storage, which means you can take advantage of its scalability, reliability, and security features.

You can use Azure Elastic SAN to store and manage your data in a highly available and durable way, with features like snapshots and replication.

Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-based storage solution that provides a scalable and highly available storage infrastructure for Azure Virtual Machines. It's designed to meet the needs of modern applications that require high performance and low latency.

Azure Elastic SAN is built on top of Azure Storage, which is a highly available and durable storage service that provides a wide range of features, including redundancy, encryption, and access control.

With Azure Elastic SAN, you can create and manage virtual hard disks (VHDs) that can be attached to Azure Virtual Machines, providing a flexible and scalable storage solution.

Azure Elastic SAN is optimized for Azure Virtual Machines, providing low latency and high throughput, making it an ideal solution for applications that require high performance storage.

Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-based storage solution that allows businesses to scale their storage needs on demand. It's a great option for companies that need to store and manage large amounts of data.

Azure Elastic SAN is built on top of Azure Blob Storage, which is a highly available and durable storage solution. This means that your data is always accessible and safe.

One of the key benefits of Azure Elastic SAN is that it's highly scalable. You can easily add or remove storage capacity as your needs change. This makes it a great choice for businesses that have unpredictable or rapidly growing storage needs.

Azure Elastic SAN is also highly available, with a guarantee of 99.99% uptime. This means that your data is always accessible, even in the event of a failure or maintenance.

Azure Elastic SAN is a game-changer for modern storage infrastructures, and its key features are designed to meet the scalability, management, and security needs of today's workloads.

It offers a fully managed environment, eliminating the complexity typically associated with configuring and managing a traditional SAN. This allows administrators to focus on applications rather than the underlying infrastructure.

Azure Elastic SAN supports up to 80,000 IOPS per single volume and speeds up to 1,280 MBps, making it ideal for high-throughput and IOPS-intensive workloads.

The solution also implements advanced security measures, including server-side encryption with customer-managed keys and support for private endpoints, to ensure data is protected in accordance with company policies and industry regulations.

Here are some of the key features of Azure Elastic SAN in a concise list:

Azure Elastic SAN also supports Azure VM, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), cloud-native, edge, and on-prem computing via iSCSI, making it a versatile solution for a variety of use cases.

Azure Elastic SAN offers numerous benefits, making it an ideal solution for various operational scenarios. It's perfect for optimizing SQL databases, which often require high throughput and IOPS.

Azure Elastic SAN can help you avoid oversizing Azure VMs, thus optimizing performance and reducing costs. This is particularly useful for databases like SQL Server.

One of the key advantages of Azure Elastic SAN is its ability to facilitate the migration of on-premises SAN environments to the cloud. This is made possible by its IOPS and throughput capabilities, which dynamically share performance across workloads.

Azure Elastic SAN enables storage consolidation by dynamically sharing performance across volumes. This helps to prevent oversizing necessary to manage traffic peaks and achieve high performance efficiently.

You can also use Azure Elastic SAN to expand the storage capacity of Azure VMware Solution without increasing vSAN storage nodes. This is done by presenting an Elastic SAN volume as an external datastore.

Lastly, Azure Elastic SAN supports Azure Container Storage, leveraging the efficiency of the iSCSI protocol. This integration enables significant storage cost reductions through dynamic resource sharing.

Here are some of the key use cases for Azure Elastic SAN:

Cost optimization and consolidation with Azure Elastic SAN is a game-changer for businesses. You can increase your SAN storage in bulk, which can lead to significant cost savings.

One way to achieve cost optimization is to increase your storage capacity without increasing the SAN's performance, potentially offering a lower total cost of ownership. This is especially true when you consider that the capacity-only unit allows you to provision capacity only without provisioning performance at a lower cost of $-$-/GiB.

With Elastic SAN, you generally won't need to overprovision volumes, because you share the performance of the SAN with all its volumes. This can lead to a more efficient use of resources and lower costs.

In fact, the cost of adding storage capacity without increasing base unit (e.g., performance) for US East is $61.44 per month, which works out to $0.06 per GB per month (no additional provisioned IOPS or Bandwidth) or $0.000083 per GB per hour.

Here's a comparison of the costs of different provisioning options:

By choosing the right provisioning option, you can achieve significant cost savings with Azure Elastic SAN.

Azure Elastic SAN offers impressive performance capabilities, with IOPs increasing in increments of 5,000 per base TB, allowing for up to 100,000 IOPs for a 20TB base.

Each volume's performance is determined by its capacity, with a maximum of 80,000 IOPs and up to 1,024 MBps, but only if the volume is at least 107GB in space capacity.

Azure Elastic SAN volumes can connect to a wide variety of compute resources using the iSCSI protocol, making it a versatile storage solution that can serve multiple compute options.

This shared performance model means that individual volume performance is capped at 80,000 IOPs and 1,024 MBps, but the aggregate performance of all volumes can't exceed the total of the AES.

Azure Elastic SAN offers incredible performance capabilities, with the ability to scale up to millions of IOPs. This is a game-changer for businesses that require high-performance storage solutions.

With an Elastic SAN, you can achieve double-digit GB/s throughput and single-digit millisecond latency. This is made possible by the shared performance capabilities of the SAN, which allows each volume to scale up to 80,000 IOPs as long as the SAN's caps aren't exceeded.

The performance of an Elastic SAN is shared across all its volumes, which means that each volume can have more performance than what a given VM is limited to. This is a key advantage of using an Elastic SAN, as it allows businesses to scale their performance up to meet their needs.

Elastic SAN volumes connect to clients using the iSCSI protocol, which allows them to bypass the IOPS limit of an Azure VM and offers high throughput limits. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses that require high-performance storage without being limited by their VM's capabilities.

As you scale your performance with an Elastic SAN, keep in mind that individual volume performance is determined by its capacity, with a maximum of 80,000 IOPs and up to 1,024 MBps. This means that to reach these limits, an AES volume would have to be at least 107GB in space capacity.

Azure Elastic SAN volumes can connect to a wide variety of compute resources using the internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) protocol. This allows you to configure an Elastic SAN to serve as the storage solution for multiple compute options, and manage it separately from each option.

This flexibility is a game-changer for many organizations, as it eliminates the need to configure storage for each individual compute option. By using iSCSI, you can easily connect your Elastic SAN to different compute resources, streamlining your storage management.

The iSCSI protocol is a standard technology that enables the connection of storage devices over a network, making it a reliable choice for connecting your Elastic SAN to various compute resources.

Azure Elastic SAN works seamlessly with various Azure services, including VMs, Clusters, Containers, and Azure VMware Solution, allowing them to access AES storage volumes.

You can access AES storage volumes from Azure or on-prem resources using iSCSI.

The storage capacity of an AES SAN can be specified in base units with performance and any additional space capacity, ranging from 3 to 24 characters.

To create an AES SAN, you need to specify the storage capacity, which can be up to 24 characters long.

LRS (Local Redundancy) provides local redundancy, while ZRS (Zone Resiliency) offers enhanced zone resiliency with high-speed synchronous resiliency.

You can create volumes by specifying the volume name, volume group to use, volume size in GB, maximum IOPs, and bandwidth.

AES volumes can be accessed from Azure or on-prem resources using iSCSI, and private endpoints can be created for additional security and access controls.