I’m excited to share our recent updates to Azure Elastic SAN—our solution for high-scale cost efficiency in the cloud. Whether you’re looking for a seamless migration of your SAN environment or looking to consolidate existing workloads within the cloud, this enterprise-class offering stands out by helping you simplify your storage management experience and giving you the optimal price-performance ratio for your workloads.
With the SAN-like resource hierarchy, you can provision resources at the storage level and dynamically distribute these resources to meet the demands of diverse workloads across databases like SQL and Oracle, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDIs), and business applications. It supports a multitude of compute options, including workloads running on Azure VMware Solution, containerized applications (via Azure Container Storage), and virtual machines. Beyond that, it delivers cloud-native benefits with scale on demand, policy-based service management, and cloud-native security enforcements across encryption and network access. It’s a solution that combines the efficiency at scale of on-premises SAN systems and the flexibility of Cloud.
Since the general availability (GA) release of Azure Elastic SAN in early 2024, we have introduced various new capabilities that let you integrate more workloads, a few of which I want to highlight in this blog.
Enhanced resiliency, scalability, and simplicity to empower mission-critical workloads
We have released the public preview of autoscale for capacity. Elastic SAN is the first block storage solution in the cloud to support autoscaling. This will help save you time by simplifying management of the Elastic SAN, as you can set a policy for autoscaling your capacity when you are running out of storage rather than needing to actively track whether your storage is reaching its limits. With autoscaling, you can scale up on demand, so there is less of a need to provision extra storage just in case, helping you lower your monthly bill. Plus, you will be able to set the exact increments by which your SAN(s) will grow, so you stay in control of your total cost. It is a feature that fits in well with our theme of improving the ease of storage management.
We have also made snapshot support on Elastic SAN generally available. You can now take instant point-in-time backups of the state of your workloads with Elastic SAN volume snapshots. You can export these volume snapshots to managed disk snapshots for hardening purposes. Snapshots can be either full or incremental snapshots of your data, and you can restore your volumes from either of these snapshots in case you need to recover from a disaster.
Additionally, we have enabled CRC protection to help you maintain the integrity of your data by providing CRC32C checksum verification. If enabled on the client side, Elastic SAN supports checksum verification at the volume group level. This will cause connections that don’t have CRC32C set for both header and data digests to be rejected, to prevent accidental errors during communication or storage of data.
All of this is backed by our published availability SLA of 99.99%, which covers mission critical workloads running on Elastic SAN. This is what will allow you to maintain your peace of mind while running these workloads.
Hosting SQL on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) with Elastic SAN
We have dedicated ourselves to ensuring that the SQL experience on Elastic SAN has been fully validated and optimized for cost savings. We have verified that you can reliably use Elastic SAN for your clustered workloads like SQL FCI. This is especially helpful when paired with ZRS (zone-redundant storage) as you can ensure zonal redundancy for your failover clusters. Additionally, to assist with storage and workload consolidation of multi-SQL databases hosted on Elastic SAN, we built out Elastic SAN in such a way that you can get the performance you need while simultaneously improving your total cost of ownership with features like dynamic performance allocation. The performance you provision at the SAN level is shared across all the SAN volumes you create, and since all of your workloads won’t peak at the same time, you can avoid provisioning for the total peak performance target of all your workloads by utilizing this dynamic performance allocation. This helps with cost reduction as you no longer need to provision for your peak performance targets.
Reduced total cost of operations (TCO) for Azure VMware Solution with Elastic SAN
Azure Elastic SAN is now available as a storage option for all Azure VMware Solution SKUs, including the all new AV64 SKUs. Because Azure VMware Solution supports attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage option, you can attach Elastic SAN volumes to an Azure VMware Solution cluster of your choice and present them as Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores. By using VMFS datastores backed by Azure Elastic SAN, you can expand your storage with an Azure deployed, fully-managed and VMware Certified storage area network instead of scaling more local storage nodes in the cluster. Additionally, Elastic SAN is the only Azure block storage offering with ZRS capabilities that VMware customers can leverage. ZRS ensures high availability and resiliency by storing three copies of each SAN in three distinct and physically isolated storage clusters across different Azure availability zones.
Customers who are leveraging Azure VMware Solution for disaster recovery use cases or hosting capacity intensive workloads, can benefit from a more cost-efficient, extensible storage solution. For instance, you could stand up a AVS cluster as the secondary site for on-premises VMware environment, and replicate data into Elastic SAN while keeping minimal cluster footprint. At $0.06-0.08 per GiB per month (based on current pricing in East US1), Azure Elastic SAN is the most cost efficient per GiB storage option for AVS, while still offering scalable performance for a variety of use cases—and it can be deployed and connected straight from the Azure portal, making it an integrated and easy experience.
Enabling cloud-native workloads on Elastic SAN
For customers building their applications in the cloud, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the new VM. Azure Container Storage is Azure’s latest solution to simplify and offer comprehensive persistent storage management for stateful containers. Available as an easy add-on to your AKS cluster, one of the backing storage options you can use through Azure Container Storage is Elastic SAN. Azure Container Storage lets you provision persistent volumes (PVs) within a single Elastic SAN, sharing the performance available in the same SAN across multiple PVs. Because Elastic SAN utilizes iSCSI protocol to connect to AKS clusters, traditional VM-based limitations on the number of persistent volumes you can attach per node are overcome, reaching new heights of scale. Azure Container Storage can also be used with ZRS enabled, which offers enhanced resiliency for your workloads.
Traditional storage management for stateful containers meant provisioning storage resources, deploying PVs within your cluster, and manually managing the connection and scaling of the storage resource with your cluster. With Azure Container Storage, persistent volume orchestration and coordination of your Elastic SAN via your AKS cluster is fully managed for you. With the preview of autoscaling on Elastic SAN, storage management at scale is even simpler through Azure Container Storage. By setting your autoscale policy, you don’t need to worry about running into capacity limitations.
Getting started with Azure Elastic SAN
As always, there is more to come. Our roadmap for the year ahead involves expanding Elastic SANs existing backup and disaster recovery functionality, expanding our locally redundant storage (LRS) and ZRS footprint into new regions, and helping customers achieve even lower latencies and higher performance. For now, you can deploy an Elastic SAN2 by following our instructions on how to get started or refer to our documentation to learn more. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to the PM team at AzElasticSAN-Ex@microsoft.com, and someone from our team will be happy to assist.
1You can find the most up to date pricing on our pricing page.
2 For a list of available regions please refer to our documentation.
The post What’s new in Azure Elastic SAN appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
