Azure Storage has developed to bolster the evolution of Microsoft AI and enterprise cloud onboarding with a number of improvements.
Final January, we shared our reflection of 2023 and outlook for 2024—and what a yr it has been! Microsoft has been on the forefront of groundbreaking AI options, empowering finish prospects, builders and IT Professionals within the cloud whereas accelerating enterprise migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has developed to bolster the evolution of Microsoft AI and enterprise cloud onboarding with improvements in platform infrastructure, product choices, and workload integration. A couple of notable highlights from 2024:
- Azure Storage, the filesystem for AI on Azure, enabled mannequin coaching with exabytes of information and supported inferencing/AI purposes for startups and enterprises.
- Premium SSD v2 disks, our general-purpose block storage, continued to develop double digit MoM, with expanded integration for brand spanking new workloads like Epic and Oracle.
- Azure Elastic SAN, the trade’s solely cloud native SAN providing, grew by greater than 10 occasions inside few months of common availability, highlighting sturdy buyer pursuits to transition from on-prem SAN to cloud.
- Azure Container Storage, our new Kubernetes storage administration resolution, simplifies cloud native app growth with a unified expertise for all backing storage choices from ephemeral disks to Azure Disks.
As we enter 2025, our focus stays on our prospects, with a imaginative and prescient to offer an clever knowledge platform that maximizes the worth of their knowledge. We measure our success by our prospects’ success and can proceed to develop sturdy fundamentals and improvements to profit our prospects and companions. We prolong a heartfelt thanks to our prospects and companions for his or her belief and collaboration, driving us to realize extra collectively.
Fundamentals for Innovation
Below Microsoft’s Secured Future (SFI) initiatives, we’ve strengthened safety throughout a number of classes—safety by default, design, and operations—leading to vital platform enhancements in id and secret safety, community safety, engineering methods safety, monitoring, and safe design evaluation. We additionally launched customer-facing capabilities for safety and knowledge safety, together with Microsoft Defender help for Storage, Purview safety insurance policies help (in preview), Community Safety Perimeter (in preview), and TLS 1.3 Blob help. We now have plans in 2025 to broaden our safe by default posture throughout numerous choices, with insurance policies leveraging identity-based authentication and discouraging nameless entry.
Our investments in platform resiliency concentrate on proactive mitigation of impactful buyer points through predictive evaluation. We achieved 52% discount in excessive influence incidents within the second half of 2024 in comparison with 2023. In parallel, we proceed to empower prospects in constructing extremely out there (HA) options and enhancing our enterprise continuity and catastrophe restoration (BCDR) help through capabilities like multi-volume snapshots for Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disks, and deliberate failover for Blobs and Information (in preview). In 2025, we’ll leverage AI and construct automation to additional improve failure prediction and detection, decreasing each the incidence and restoration time of excessive influence incidents; and empower prospects with richer insights to trace workload well being alerts for proactive mitigation.
Improvements for AI and rising workloads
From powering cutting-edge AI options to driving seamless cloud experiences, storage innovation has change into the spine of technological progress. However how do organizations keep forward on this quickly evolving panorama? The reply lies in targeted improvements—focused developments that rework how we handle, entry, and make the most of knowledge.
Accelerating AI innovation with differentiated capabilities
In 2024, we superior giant language mannequin growth in collaboration with OpenAI, with Azure Storage serving as the muse for the AI lifecycle. At Ignite, we showcased how OpenAI leveraged Azure Blob Storage all through the lifecycle, from ingesting huge datasets for mannequin coaching to enabling seamless knowledge administration and growth with out growing operational complexity. Such achievement is made attainable with Blob Storage scaled accounts offering extremely scalable throughput to forestall efficiency bottlenecks and simplify infrastructure. Extra of those capabilities that we now have developed in collaboration with AI-scale prospects comparable to OpenAI will are available in 2025. We may also deliver these developments into Azure Information Lake Storage (ADLS) and provide extra clever capabilities on ADLS concentrating on AI workloads for extra environment friendly knowledge processing.
We’re engaged on an thrilling innovation that can seamlessly join unstructured knowledge with Azure AI companies and different corporations’ AI options, whether or not that knowledge resides on-premises, in different clouds, or inside Azure. Constructing multi-modal enterprise AI purposes requires entry to huge quantities of unstructured knowledge however enabling safe and well-governed entry to essential enterprise knowledge throughout cloud and on-premises environments is a serious problem for purchasers. This rising resolution will sort out the problem by securely connecting your knowledge with Azure AI companies like Azure AI Foundry, and Azure Machine Studying, via their deep integration with Azure Blob—with out the necessity for knowledge migration or copying. By accelerating entry to AI, decreasing time to perception, and enabling the logical unification of information from a number of sources, this resolution will pave the best way for transformative developments in enterprise AI. With strong governance powered by instruments like Azure RBAC, it will provide you with full management over your knowledge property. The restricted preview of this resolution can be out there quickly, with common availability deliberate for 2025.
Targeted improvements for rising workloads
Because the cloud-first method turns into the default amongst startups and enterprises, we’re witnessing the emergence of latest data-centric workloads associated to AI coaching, safety scanning constructed on stateful containers. In response to growing demand of storage catered for containers, we launched Azure Container Storage, which affords a spread of storage choices through the native Kubernetes interface, with help for brand spanking new block storage choices like ephemeral disks and Elastic SAN. That is particularly useful for workloads hosted on digital machines (VMs) with graphics processing models (GPUs), the place terabytes of native NVMe can speed up mannequin coaching and inferencing. Furthermore, builders not want to decide on between resiliency and pace for ephemeral disks. Azure Container Storage affords replication with versatile choices, making certain excessive resiliency inside or throughout zones and finest efficiency in the marketplace. In 2025, we’ll improve integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by streamlining the set up expertise and enhance cost-efficiency with common availability help for Elastic SAN.
Optimizations for mission essential workloads
We proceed to optimize the expertise for working mission-critical workloads throughout our product portfolio. We delivered to the market—Azure Elastic SAN, optimized for price-performance at scale and seamless on-premises SAN migration to Azure. With the common availability of Azure VMware Resolution integration, prospects can leverage it not just for VMs and containers but additionally as a local VMware datastore. We not too long ago launched 99.99% uptime SLA help, immediate snapshot (in preview) with Azure Backup (in preview), and capability auto-scaling (in preview). These capabilities solidify Elastic SAN as a number one alternative for enterprise storage at scale. Wanting forward, we’re specializing in optimization for database and bare-metal use instances, decreasing entry latency and enhancing IOPS scalability, and advancing BCDR help.
In parallel, we’re advancing our Disk choices to satisfy the rising wants of enterprises. To assist prospects scale up database efficiency throughout peak visitors, we launched Mbv3 VM collection, supporting as much as 650,000 disk IOPS—greater than a 50% enhance. We additionally enabled common availability for stay resizing on our Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disk choices, simplifying on-demand storage growth. With the added help for disk kind conversion, prospects can improve to those newest SKUs in place. Within the coming yr, we’re touchdown extra enhancements on Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disks together with automated catastrophe restoration through Azure Web site Restoration (ASR), and Azure Migrate integration.
Azure NetApp Information (ANF) brings the energy of NetApp ONTAP to the cloud as a local Azure service, providing broad protocol compatibility, and sub-millisecond latency. The overall availability launch of enormous volumes, elevating the size from 50 TiB to 2 PiB with over 700,000 IOPS and 12.5 GiBps throughput, positions ANF to deal with mission essential workloads in sectors like Digital Design Automation and high-performance computing (HPC). We are going to proceed optimizing cost-efficiency and enabling integration with Azure AI companies.
Azure Information affords absolutely managed file shares for hybrid, lift-and-shift and cloud native purposes. To deliver you the advantages of pay-as-you-go pricing whereas offering predictable prices, we launched a brand new provisioning mannequin—Provisioned v2 on Commonplace Information. You possibly can independently scale out the dimensions, IOPS, and throughput per workload necessities, ranging from 32 GiB. In 2025, our focus is to ease elevate and shift of workloads with simplified administration and seamless knowledge migration whereas enabling cloud native use instances with built-in id, and enhanced efficiency.
Main with our associate ecosystem
We proceed to strengthen our associate ecosystem to offer prospects with alternative and ship strong hybrid administration capabilities adhering to excessive requirements for high quality and safety. In 2024, we collaborated with companions in delivering Komprise clever tiering for Azure and Veeam Information Cloud Vault constructed on Blob. We delight ourselves on joint innovation and are excited to announce upcoming releases in 2025:
- Nasuni Information Service will enable our joint prospects to entry knowledge saved in Nasuni UniFS through a Blob API suitable gateway.
- Pure Storage will launch a totally managed scalable block storage service on Azure.
- Dell will deliver Dell-Managed as-a-Service choices of OneFS and Information Area to our joint prospects.
Wanting forward with Azure Storage
As we step into 2025, the horizon for storage innovation is extra thrilling than ever. With developments like AI-driven optimization, sustainable infrastructure, and lightning-fast entry speeds, we’re redefining what’s attainable in Azure Storage. The yr forward isn’t nearly storing extra—it’s about empowering companies to realize extra with smarter, scalable, and future-ready storage options. Right here’s to a yr of turning knowledge into prospects!