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 reinforce the Azure platform and its ecosystem, gasoline groundbreaking AI options, and facilitate seamless migrations to the cloud. We obtain this by means of purpose-built storage options tailor-made to satisfy the distinctive calls for of your workloads.
2023 was an emblematic 12 months of progress for storage and knowledge providers with AI on the high of thoughts for a lot of clients. Azure clients’ general knowledge property continued to develop, powered by the emergence of latest 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 have been sharply larger 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 whole transactions of Premium Recordsdata, 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 have been made in 5 strategic areas aligning with buyer workload patterns, cloud computing developments, and the evolution of AI.
Targeted improvements for brand new workloads
We’ve made developments in providing end-to-end options with distinctive storage capabilities, tailor-made to assist clients convey new workloads to Azure, with out the necessity to retrofit them.
As clients modernize purposes with Kubernetes, we’ve got noticed clients’ 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 presents excellent knowledge 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 presents a path to handle persistent volumes and the backend storage choices fully through the Kubernetes native expertise.
Microsoft’s Azure Elastic SAN is a completely managed storage space community (SAN) service that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN within the cloud. It’s designed to handle clients’ challenges in service administration with regards to migrating a large-scale SAN equipment to cloud. We’re the primary out there in offering a completely managed SAN providing on cloud, with built-in cloud scale and excessive availability choices. It adopts a SAN-like hierarchy, provisioning sources on the top-level useful resource, dynamically sharing sources throughout the workloads, managing safety insurance policies on the workload degree. As well as, it allows clients to convey new knowledge intensive workloads to Azure VMware Resolution 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 situations. Normal availability is deliberate for the upcoming months.
AI is main a contemporary wave of innovation powered by knowledge. Azure Blob Storage stands on the forefront of this knowledge explosion, offering wonderful efficiency and excessive bandwidth entry for all AI coaching wants. Azure Premium Block Blob, typically obtainable since 2019, supplies 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 presents a completely managed distributed parallel file system tailor-made for prime efficiency computing (HPC) and AI coaching workloads.
OneLake (which is the storage layer for Microsoft Cloth) is powered by the size, efficiency, and wealthy capabilities of Azure Knowledge 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 knowledge operations, leading to a big efficiency enhance, particularly when used with Azure Premium Block Blob. Multi-protocol entry is one other distinctive functionality that enables clients to work with their knowledge utilizing quite a lot of entry protocols (together with REST, SFTP and NFS v3) eliminating knowledge silos, expensive knowledge motion, and duplication.
Optimizations for mission crucial workloads
We proceed so as to add differentiated capabilities to allow enterprises to optimize their mission crucial workloads hosted on Azure.
With the overall availability of Premium SSD v2, we’ve got been actively onboarding options centered on mission crucial knowledge. Gigaom highlighted the superior efficiency and lowered complete value of possession of SQL Server 2019 working on Azure Digital Machines (VMs) with Premium SSD v2. Related advantages apply to different database workloads like PostgreSQL. We are going to proceed enhancing Premium SSD v2 capabilities and broaden regional protection within the upcoming 12 months.
Azure Blob Storage powers data-intensive mission crucial workloads globally, together with a few of the largest AI mannequin coaching and inferencing. Cloud-native firms host exabytes of consumer-generated knowledge and depend on the platform’s scale-out capabilities. Main retailers retailer trillions of person actions to energy suggestion engines and stock methods. The Chilly storage tier, launched in 2023, allows cost-efficient retention of this knowledge.
Enterprises migrate Home windows Server workloads to the cloud for modernization, supported by enhanced Azure Recordsdata and Azure File Sync capabilities. The preview of Microsoft Entra ID (beforehand named as Azure Lively Listing help for Azure Recordsdata REST API) allows trendy purposes to make use of identity-based authentication and authorization for accessing SMB file shares. Azure Recordsdata presents complete authentication help, 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 knowledge and permissions intact whereas eliminating advanced area be a part of setups within the cloud. Enterprises migrating mission-critical purposes similar to SAP and Oracle depend on Azure NetApp Recordsdata (ANF) to satisfy their efficiency and knowledge safety necessities. In strategic partnership with NetApp, we launched the general public preview of ANF massive volumes as much as 500 TiB, addressing the wants of workloads that require bigger capability below a single namespace, similar to HPC in Digital Design Automation and Oil and Fuel associated purposes, and the general public preview of Cool Entry, enhancing the TCO for sometimes accessed knowledge.
Environment friendly knowledge migration at scale is crucial for profitable cloud workload migration. We provide a complete suite of migration options. Azure Storage Mover, a completely managed knowledge migration service, improves the general migration expertise of enormous knowledge units. Azure File Sync permits hybrid synchronization between on-premises Home windows Servers and Azure Recordsdata. AzCopy, a command-line utility, allows fast script-based migration jobs, whereas Azure Databox facilitates offline knowledge switch.
Increasing companion ecosystem
We transition buyer workloads to Azure in collaboration with our companions, who complement our platform capabilities with modern options. We’ve fostered quite a few profitable strategic partnerships and are delighted to see the companion neighborhood investing in unique Azure options.
Qumulo introduced the subsequent model of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service, unique to Azure and constructed to leverage Azure Blob Storage’s scale and value effectivity. This service helps exabytes of information below a single namespace, surpassing different public cloud file options, and facilitates high-scale enterprise community connected storage (NAS) knowledge migration to Azure.
Commvault unveiled a purpose-built cyber resilience resolution, completely on Azure. It empowers customers to foretell threats sooner, obtain clear recoveries, and speed up response instances. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
For the reason that launch of Pure Storage Cloud Block Storage providing on Azure in 2021, we’ve got partnered intently with Pure Storage. They use distinctive Azure Storage options similar to shared disks and have been early adopters of Extremely and Premium SSD v2 disk storage. Our collaboration has expanded to containers by means of Portworx and the Azure VMware Resolution.
Moreover storage and backup companions, we collaborate with Atempo, Knowledge Dynamics, Komprise, and Cirrus Knowledge to ship storage migration options, offering entry to industry-leading file and block options emigrate petabytes of NAS and storage space community (SAN) knowledge to Azure at no further cost.
Business contributions
We actively take part in {industry} organizations similar to Storage Networking Business Affiliation (SNIA) and the Open Compute Platform (OCP), collaborating with {industry} leaders to share insights, affect requirements, and contribute to the event of modern options and greatest 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 presents unified quantity administration throughout various storage backends and delivers a extremely obtainable block storage resolution designed to scale to thousands and thousands 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 web carbon-zero objectives within the subsequent decade. Via the OCP Sustainability Undertaking, we offer an open framework for the datacenter {industry} to undertake greatest practices for reusability and circularity and lead within the steering committee to drive progress.
Unparalleled dedication to high quality
Our main 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 value of possession (TCO) for Azure clients.
We guarantee clients of excessive knowledge sturdiness, backed by substantial investments in infrastructure, {hardware}, software program, and streamlined processes. Our Zone-redundant Storage (ZRS) ensures knowledge sturdiness of a minimum of 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) over a given 12 months—the best customary among the many main cloud service suppliers (CSPs). Notably, we’re the only real cloud supplier among the many main CSPs sustaining a 0% Annual Failure Fee (AFR) with our block storage choices since launch.
Our distinctive ZRS providing supplies a easy technique to set up extremely obtainable options throughout three zones at a fraction of the prices. You’ll be able to deploy a cross-zonal AKS cluster with persistent volumes hosted on ZRS disks to make sure knowledge sturdiness and availability throughout zonal outages. Clustered purposes like SQL failover cluster situations (FCI) leveraging Home windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) may profit from ZRS with excessive resiliency supplied out of the field.
In a concerted effort to raise buyer help expertise, we’ve built-in with Azure Copilot, empowering help engineers to troubleshoot extra effectively whereas delivering high quality responses shortly. This has resulted in a noteworthy enhance in buyer satisfaction scores.
In closing, 2023 has been a 12 months of profound studying and substantial progress. Discover our function 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!