Azure Storage is a cloud service hosted by Microsoft, which provides high availability, security, reliability, scalability and redundancy. Azure storage is divided into five storage services: Azure NetApp Files, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Queues, Azure Tables and Azure Disks. This article introduces the first three services and lists the scalability and performance limits of Azure Storage services, in one place and using easily readable tables. When your application reaches the workload limit for any Azure Storage service, Azure Storage will return error code 503 (server busy) or error code 500 (timeout). It is important to monitor for these error codes and ensure your application respects the limits, to prevent faults or outages. Naturally, limits can also affect performance of Azure services. This is part of our series of articles about Azure NetApp Files Storage. In this article, you will learn about storage limits for: Azure NetApp Files is a NAS file sharing storage service that enables administrators to access SMB file shares via the cloud. Like other Azure storage products, these shares can be configured as part of an Azure storage account.What are Azure Storage Limits?
Azure Storage Limits
Azure NetApp Files
Azure NetApp Files restrictions are divided into three categories: storage accounts, shares, and files.
Standard Azure storage account
The main resource of Azure NetApp Files Sharing is your Azure storage account. A storage account is an Azure storage group that allows you to use various storage services (including Azure NetApp Files) to store data.
The following table lists the default limits of Azure general-purpose v1, general-purpose v2, blob storage and block blob storage accounts. The ingress restriction applies to all data transferred to your storage account; egress restrictions apply to all data retrieved from your storage account.
Resource | Regions | Limit per Storage Account |
Number of storage accounts per region | N/A | 250 |
Maximum storage capacity | All | 5 PB |
Maximum request rate | All | 20,000 requests per second |
Maximum ingress | US and Europe | 10 Gbps |
Maximum ingress | Other Regions | 5 Gbps** |
Maximum egress | US | 50 Gbps* |
Maximum egress | Other Regions | 10 Gbps** |
Maximum number of virtual network rules | All | 200 |
Maximum number of IP address rules | All | 200 |
(*) This limit applies to accounts of type “general-purpose v2” or “blob storage”. If you have a “general-purpose v1” account, with RA-GRS/GRS, the limit is 20 Gbps, or 30 Gbps if LRS/ZRS is used.
(**) This limit applies if your storage account uses RA-GRS/GRS. Otherwise, for LRS/ZRS, the limit is 15 Gbps.
(***) There are no limits for the number of blob containers, blobs, entities, queues, tables, file shares, or messages.
Premium FileStorage account limits
Premium FileStorage accounts are designed for low latency, high performance and high IOPS workloads. There is no limit on file shares you can create within a premium account.
In a Premium FileStorage account, storage size is limited to 100 TB. You can perform up to 100,000 I/O operations per second. Ingress and egress have dramatically higher limits - 4,136 MB/s and 6,204 MB/s, respectively.
Limitations related to file shares
Resource | Standard file shares | Premium file shares |
Minimum share size | N/A | 100 GB |
Maximum share size | 5 TB by default, can be increased up to 100TB | 100 TB |
Maximum file size | 1 TB | 4 TB |
Maximum IOPS | 1,000 IOPS* | 100,000 IOPS |
Maximum stored access policies** | 5 | 5 |
Target throughput** | 60 MB/sec** | Ingress 4,136 MB/s Egress 6,204 MB/s |
Maximum number of share snapshots | 200 | 200 |
Maximum directory/file name length (chars) | 2,048 | 2,048 |
Maximum hard links | N/A | 178 |
(*) You can increase this up to 10,000 IOPS.
(**) You can increase this up to 300 MB/s
(***) Computed for one file share.
Azure NetApp Files Sync
Azure NetApp Files Sync is designed for maximum scalability, but does have its limits.
The following are hard limits posed by the File Sync technical architecture:
- Up to 100 Sync Services per region, up to 200 Sync Groups per Sync Service, up to 99 servers with per Sync Service with up to one server endpoint each.
- No more than one cloud endpoint per Sync Group.
- Up to 5 million directories and/or files in a directory
The following are “soft limits” defined based on Microsoft testing and practical experience.
- Up to 50 servers per Sync Group
- Up to 100 million directories and/or files per Sync Group
- Up to 100 GB allowed size for a single file
Blob Storage
Blob storage is a Microsoft Azure service used to store large binary files such as text, images, and videos. Blobs are stored structures known as “containers”, similar to the concept of a directory. Below are limits you should be aware of with regard to blob storage.
Resource | Type of Blob | Limit |
Maximum size of single blob container | 5 PB | |
Maximum number of blocks | Block / Append | 50,000 |
Maximum block size | Block | 100 MB |
Maximum total block size | Append | 4 MiB |
Maximum total blob size | Block | Approx. 4.75 TB |
Maximum total blob size | Append | Approximately 195 GB |
Maximum total blob size | Page | 8 TB |
Maximum stored access policies per container | All | 5 |
Target request rate for blob | All | 500/second |
Target throughput for blob | Page | 60 MB/s |
Target throughput for blob | Block | Depends on storage account ingress/egress limits |
Azure Queue Storage
Azure Queue Storage is a simple first-in-first-out (FIFO) architecture. The Azure Queue Storage system is composed of the following elements:
- Storage Account—the top-level structure including all Azure storage services
- Queue—a series of messages.
- Message—a specific message in the queue, which can contain any type of information. Can be a text string, array of bytes, and may store information in formats like XML, CSV, TSV, etc.
The following table shows the limits of each element in the Queue Storage system.
Resource | System Element | Limit |
Maximum request rate (assuming 1 KB sized messages) | Storage Account | 20,000/second |
Maximum size | Queue | 500 TB |
Maximum number of stored access policies | Queue | 5 |
Target throughput (assuming 1 KB sized messages) | Queue | 2,000/second |
Maximum size | Message | 64 KB |
Azure NetApp Files
Azure NetApp Files is an enterprise-grade file sharing service provided by Azure, and based on NetApp storage technology. It can support mission critical workloads with high performance and throughput requirements.
There are two types of limits in Azure NetApp Files: resource limits and maxfiles limits, which controls the number of files in a volume.
Flexible resource limits
The following limits are applied by default in Azure NetApp Files, but may be changed by support request:
- Up to 10 NetApp accounts for every Azure region
- Up to 25 capacity pools per account
- Up to 500 volumes for each capacity pool
- Up to 500 volumes per Azure subscription
Hard resource limits
These resource limits cannot be changed:
- Up to 255 snapshots for each storage volume
- Capacity pools must be between 4-500 TB
- Volumes must be between 100 GB-100 TB
- Single files may not be larger than 16 TB
- Directory metadata may not be larger than 320 MB
- Assigned throughput for QoS volume must be between 1-4,500 MB/s
- Up to 5 replicas for data protection volumes
Maxfiles limits
Azure NetApp Files has an additional limit called “maxfiles”, which determines how many files customers can store in a single volume. This limit changes depending on the provisioned size of the volume:
- For volumes smaller than 1 TB in size, the maxfiles limit is 20 million files
- For each additional 1 TB in volume size, the maxfiles limit is extended by 20 million more files - for example, a volume between 2-3 TB in size has a limit of 60 million files
- For volumes larger than 4 TB, the limit is 100 million files
Overcoming Azure Storage Limits with NetApp Azure NetApp Files
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure NetApp Files storage service built on NetApp technology, giving you the file capabilities in Azure even your core business applications require.
Get enterprise-grade data management and storage to Azure so you can manage your workloads and applications with ease, and move all of your file-based applications to the cloud.
Azure NetApp Files solves availability and performance challenges for enterprises that want to move mission-critical applications to the cloud, including workloads like HPC, SAP, Linux, Oracle and SQL Server workloads, Windows Virtual Desktop, and more.
Azure NetApp Files expands the limits of file storage in Azure. It extends single volume performance to over 300k IOPS with validated throughput of up to 4.5GBps - with access latency of less than a millisecond. This opens the door for applications such as transactional databases to achieve file performance that was never before achievable in Azure.
FAQs
How do I check my Azure storage capacity? ›
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Select Monitor from the left-hand pane in the Azure portal, and.
- Under the Insights section, select Storage Accounts (preview).
Storage Analytics has a 20 TB limit on the amount of stored data that is independent of the total limit for your storage account.
What is the blob size limit in Azure? ›Blobs in the Azure storage emulator are limited to a maximum size of 2 GiB.
Is Azure blob storage Unlimited? ›What can you store in a blob container inside Azure storage? A blob container is similar to a directory in a file system which organises the blobs. A storage account can include an unlimited number of containers, and a container can store an unlimited number of blobs.
What is the limit of cloud storage? ›You can use Google Cloud Storage to store data in Google's cloud. Cloud Storage is typically used to store unstructured data. You can add objects of any kind and size, and up to 5 TB.
How do I check storage availability? ›- On your Android phone or tablet, open the Google One app .
- At the bottom, tap Storage.
- Under "Storage used," find storage for each product.
- Under "Family storage," find storage used by any family members in your plan.
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Navigate to your storage account.
- In the Settings section, select Configuration.
- Under Account kind, select on Upgrade.
- Under Confirm upgrade, enter the name of your account.
- Select Upgrade at the bottom of the blade.
Maximum Block Size is 100 MB by design, There are different ways you can upload large files to Blob.
What is the maximum size of data blob in a record? ›BLOB: Can handle up to 65,535 bytes of data. MEDIUMBLOB: The maximum length supported is 16,777,215 bytes. LONGBLOB: Stores up to 4,294,967,295 bytes of data.
What is the difference between Azure storage and blob storage? ›Azure File Storage and Blob Storage offer the same level of redundancy, but Azure Blob Storage is cheaper than File Storage. Azure File Storage provides the folder for the data storage, while Azure Blob Storage does not provide the folder. They give a flat structure for data storage.
What are three types of Azure storage? ›
Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components. Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data. Azure Disks: Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs.
Is there infinite storage in the cloud? ›Is There Unlimited Cloud Storage? Yes, there is. However, very few cloud storage providers offer unlimited storage space, and those that do don't offer it on plans intended for personal users. That means that you're left with either business storage solutions or online backup providers.
Who has the largest cloud storage? ›Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing service of Amazon.com, is the largest cloud service provider globally. From its data centers, the business provides over 200 fully featured services including compute, storage, and database.
Can the world run out of cloud storage? ›There is a theoretical limit to cloud storage, but that limit is already so huge that it doesn't seem to be a problem in the near future. Even if we start inching closer to that limit, there are people who are making sure that new storage units are being created all the time, so the limit would never be reached.
Which is bigger CLOB or blob? ›Maximum length of CLOB (in bytes or OCTETS)) 2 147 483 647. Maximum length of BLOB (in bytes) 2 147 483 647.
What is the highest file storage capacity? ›| Storage Limit | File Size Limit | |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft OneDrive | Unlimited | 250 GB |
| Google Drive | 30 TB | 750 GB |
| Box | Unlimited | 15 GB |
| IDrive | 50 TB | 10 GB |
| File system | Maximum size |
|---|---|
| exFAT | 16 EB |
| FAT12 | 16 MB (4 KB clusters) or 32 MB (8 KB clusters) |
| FAT16B | 2 GB (without LFS) or 4 GB (with LFS) |
| FAT32 | 4 GB |
Answer: There is a 1MB limit on the amount of data a Valuemap or Dataset can hold.
What is the difference between blob and longblob? ›BLOB: Can handle up to 65,535 bytes of data. MEDIUMBLOB: The maximum length supported is 16,777,215 bytes. LONGBLOB: Stores up to 4,294,967,295 bytes of data.
What is the max byte size? ›byte: The byte data type is an 8-bit signed two's complement integer. It has a minimum value of -128 and a maximum value of 127 (inclusive).
Will storing 1tb of data in Azure blob storage always cost the same? ›
Storing 1 TB of data in Azure Blob Storage will always cost the same, regardless of the Azure region in which data is located.
Is blob storage persistent? ›The blob storage option is not persistent, as opposed to other Azure storage options like hard disks of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) or VMs. As a result, you have to use persistent stores like tiers for long-term storage of files. There are three types of storage tiers.