Guidelines for Azure NetApp Files network planning (2023)

FAQs

What protocols does Azure NetApp files support? ›

Protocols: Azure NetApp Files supports both SMB, NFSv3/NFSv4. 1, and dual-protocol volumes, which are the most common protocols used in enterprise environments. This functionality allows you to use the same protocols and tools that you use on-premises, which helps to ensure compatibility and ease of use.

Azure NetApp Files provides two QoS types of capacity pools: auto (default) and manual.

Azure Files is built on the same Azure storage platform as other services like Azure Blobs. Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed, highly available, enterprise-grade NAS service that can handle the most demanding, high-performance, low-latency workloads requiring advanced data management capabilities.

Benefits. Azure NetApp Files is built for simplicity, performance, and compliance. You gain a better understanding of your infrastructure, achieve high performance and reliability requirements, and protect and optimize your services.

Azure NetApp Files supports three service levels: Ultra, Premium, and Standard. The Ultra storage tier provides up to 128 MiB/s of throughput per 1 TiB of capacity provisioned. The Premium storage tier provides up to 64 MiB/s of throughput per 1 TiB of capacity provisioned.

Microsoft Azure and most other cloud providers offer several different types of storage, each with its own unique pricing structure and preferred use. Azure storage types include objects, managed files and managed disks.

Hot, cool, and archive access tiers for blob data - Azure Storage | Microsoft Learn. This browser is no longer supported. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.

Azure Files can be used to replace or supplement traditional on-premises file servers or network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

What are the 2 types of disk storage in Azure? ›

Azure NetApp Files makes it easy for enterprise line-of-business (LOB) and storage professionals to migrate and run complex, file-based applications with no code change. Azure NetApp Files is widely used as the underlying shared file-storage service in various scenarios.

Azure NetApp Files comes with three performance tiers: Standard, Premium, and Ultra. These can be provisioned with a simple click, allowing unmatched flexibility.

ONTAP allows you to provision both NAS and SAN storage for your application environment with SMB, NFS, and iSCSI support.

Azure Blob is an object storage solution. It allows you to store a large amount of unstructured data, whereas Azure files permit you to develop managed file share for the cloud. Moreover, Azure file share can also be mounted by the on premises deployment of Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Azure Managed Disk are used as block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure VMs (It will be stored as a . VHD file). You have 3 options, Standard HDD/SSD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disks. Azure File offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via SMB protocol.

What is the difference between blob and file storage? Azure Blob Storage is an object store used for storing vast amounts unstructured data, while Azure File Storage is a fully managed distributed file system based on the SMB protocol and looks like a typical hard drive once mounted.

The minimum capacity pool size is 2 TiB. You can change the size of a capacity pool in 1-TiB increments.

The rate of performance is 80 objects per second.

What type of storage is Azure files? ›

Disk Storage

An Azure managed disk is a virtual hard disk (VHD). You can think of it like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. Azure-managed disks are stored as page blobs, which are a random IO storage object in Azure.

For over 30 years, NetApp has been the leading innovator in data storage, offering the only portfolio in the market with a single unified operating system – NetApp ONTAP – for file, block, and object storage running on performance flash, capacity flash, and hybrid flash.

Using managed disks, you can create up to 50,000 VM disks of a type in a subscription per region, allowing you to create thousands of VMs in a single subscription.

Standard Azure file shares up to 5-TiB support all four redundancy types. Standard file shares larger than 5-TiB only support LRS and ZRS. Premium Azure file shares only support LRS and ZRS.

Tier 1. Tier 1 includes fast disks, all-flash storage, hybrid flash storage. You can use Tier 1 for mission-critical or highly sensitive files. Tier 2/3. Tier 2 and Tier 3 include Slow-spinning HDD, disk-based backup appliance, cloud storage, tape.

Tier 3 is used for hot data such as ERP and CRM data which users must access often without too much delay. Compared to Tier 1 and Tier 2, this usually means medium to high performance, high capacity hard drives at a low cost per Gigabyte stored and substantially more data.

Hot file shares offer storage optimized for general purpose file sharing scenarios such as team shares and Azure File Sync. Cool file shares offer cost-efficient storage optimized for online archive storage scenarios. Azure File Sync may also be a good fit for lower churn workloads.

Azure NetApp Files is a native Azure storage service that provides enterprise-grade NFS and SMB/CIFS storage volumes for mission-critical applications, SAP HANA, databases, high-performance computing, web-applications, and user files.

Which three types of resources can NetApp Cloud Insights Monitor? ›

Azure File Share requires VPN on certain networks - Microsoft Q&A.

Azure NetApp Files now supports cross-region replication. With this new disaster recovery capability, you can replicate your Azure NetApp Files volumes from one Azure region to another in a fast and cost-effective way. It helps you protect your data from unforeseeable regional failures.

If you haven't heard, Microsoft now offers three types of storage for your Azure Virtual Machines and they include Standard HDD Storage, Standard SSD Storage, and Premium SSD Storage.

Standard HDD Storage is based on the traditional hard disk model, Standard SSD and Premium SSD Storage are both based on Solid State Storage but offer different performance characteristics.

Difference Between Managed Disks and Unmanaged Disks

In Unmanaged Disk storage, you must create a storage account in resources to hold the disks (VHD files) for your Virtual Machines. With Managed Disk Storage, you are no longer limited by the storage account limits. You can have one storage account per region.

Azure Files is built on the same Azure storage platform as other services like Azure Blobs. Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed, highly available, enterprise-grade NAS service that can handle the most demanding, high-performance, low-latency workloads requiring advanced data management capabilities.

Azure NetApp Files is an Azure native, first-party, enterprise-class, high-performance file storage service. It provides NAS volumes as a service for which you can create NetApp accounts, capacity pools, select service and performance levels, create volumes, and manage data protection.

What are two elements of the Azure NetApp Files hierarchy? ›

Azure NetApp Files provides two QoS types of capacity pools: auto (default) and manual.

Benefits. Azure NetApp Files is built for simplicity, performance, and compliance. You gain a better understanding of your infrastructure, achieve high performance and reliability requirements, and protect and optimize your services.

They both run exactly the same ONTAP operating system and are managed exactly the same way. The difference between them is that FAS systems are hybrid storage. That means that they support both SSD disks and spinning disks, your SAS drives and SATA drives as well. AFF systems, on the other hand, support SSD only.

In ONTAP, these include the following: Data compression. Data compaction. Data deduplication.

NetApp NAS Implementation

NFS and CIFS are configured on a per Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) basis.

Cloud disaster recovery (DR) and cloud backup

Deploying Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help dramatically simplify the solution implementation for both of these requirements.

LUN is a large file inside the volume. You can have multiple LUNs in the same volume. Total Volume size= data space + Snapshot reserve . Note that, if the snapshot copies grow to be bigger than the Snapshot reserve size, the volume data space will be used for extra snapshot space.

Azure Files supports the full set of NTFS basic and advanced permissions. You can view and configure NTFS permissions on directories and files in an Azure file share by mounting the share and then using Windows File Explorer or running the Windows icacls or Set-ACL command.

SMB/CIFS support.

SFTP permission model

Azure Blob Storage doesn't support Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication or authorization via SFTP. Instead, SFTP utilizes a new form of identity management called local users. Local users must use either a password or a Secure Shell (SSH) private key credential for authentication.

What protocols does Azure use? ›

Azure AD supports many standardized protocols for authentication and authorization, such as SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and WS-Federation. Azure AD also supports password vaulting and automated sign-in capabilities for apps that only support forms-based authentication.

Azure NetApp Files is a native Azure storage service that provides enterprise-grade NFS and SMB/CIFS storage volumes for mission-critical applications, SAP HANA, databases, high-performance computing, web-applications, and user files.

The main difference between these two types of communication systems are CIFS can used only in Windows operating system, whereas NFS can be used in UNIX and LINUX based systems. In terms of security, CIFS provides better network security than NFS. On the other hand, NFS offers higher scalability features than CIFS.

Network File System (NFS) is used by UNIX clients for file access. NFS uses port 2049. NFSv3 and NFSv2 use the portmapper service on TCP or UDP port 111. The portmapper service is consulted to get the port numbers for services used with NFSv3 or NFSv2 protocols such as mountd, statd, and nlm.

Maximum file upload size via the SFTP endpoint is 100 GB.

Unlike SharePoint, Azure Files (not to be confused, incidentally, with Azure Blob Storage) is essentially a cloud version of traditional WDFS/SMB/CIFS file servers.

Ensure port 445 is open: The SMB protocol requires TCP port 445 to be open. Connections will fail if port 445 is blocked.

Azure supports three approaches to deploying cloud resources - public, private, and the hybrid cloud. Selecting between them will change several factors of the services you move into Azure including cost, maintenance requirements, and security.

Azure Virtual Networks don't need to be connected to on-premises networking; you can use VLANs to build and manage cloud-native infrastructures and resources. They can then link between different Azure regions, using Azure's private networking to manage transits without using the public internet.

IP address assignment

Public IPs have two types of assignments: Static - The resource is assigned an IP address at the time it's created. The IP address is released when the resource is deleted. Dynamic - The IP address isn't given to the resource at the time of creation when selecting dynamic.