#azurestorage

Azure Cloud Training with Storage Management | Job-Oriented Azure Admin Course

Build a High-Demand Career in Cloud Computing with Azure Cloud Training

Azure Cloud with Storage Management training at RealTech IT Academy is designed for students and professionals who want to start a successful career in cloud infrastructure and cloud administration. This course focuses on practical learning, real-time cloud environments, and hands-on experience with Azure services used in modern IT companies.

Whether you come from an IT or Non-IT background, this beginner-friendly training program helps you understand cloud technologies step by step and prepares you for real job roles like Azure Administrator and Cloud Storage Engineer.

Through guided learning, live server practice, and expert mentorship, students gain industry-ready skills required to work with cloud platforms.

Key Highlights of the Course

Beginner-friendly Azure Cloud training

No coding required to start learning

Designed for both IT and Non-IT students

Hands-on practice on real cloud servers

24/7 cloud lab access for practice

Training focused on Azure Administration and Storage Management

Placement assistance and career guidance

Who Can Join This Course

Fresh graduates looking for IT careers

Working professionals wanting to switch to cloud computing

Students interested in cloud infrastructure technologies

Anyone who wants to become an Azure Administration

What is Azure Elastic SAN? Azure is pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of Azure Elastic SAN, the first fully managed and cloud-native storage area network (SAN) that simplifies cloud SAN deployment, scaling, management, and configuration. Azure Elastic SAN streamlines the migration of large SAN environments to the cloud, improving efficiency and ease.

A SAN-like resource hierarchy, appliance-level provisioning, and dynamic resource distribution to meet the needs of diverse workloads across databases, VDIs, and business applications distinguish this enterprise-class offering. It also offers scale-on-demand, policy-based service management, cloud-native encryption, and network access security. This clever solution combines cloud storage’s flexibility with on-premises SAN systems’ scale.

Since announcing Elastic SAN’s preview, they have added many features to make it enterprise-class:

Multi-session connectivity boosts Elastic SAN performance to 80,000 IOPS and 1,280 MBps per volume, even higher on the entire SAN. SQL Failover Cluster Instances can be easily migrated to Elastic SAN volumes with shared volume support. Server-side encryption with Customer-managed Keys and private endpoint support lets you restrict data consumption and volume access. Snapshot support lets you run critical workloads safely. Elastic SAN GA will add features and expand to more regions:

Use Azure Monitor Metrics to analyze performance and capacity. Azure Policy prevents misconfiguration incidents. This release also makes snapshot export public by eliminating the sign-up process.

When to use Azure Elastic SAN Elastic SAN uses iSCSI to increase storage throughput over compute network bandwidth for throughput and IOPS-intensive workloads. Optimization of SQL Server workloads is possible. SQL Server deployments on Azure VMs sometimes require overprovisioning to reach disk throughput targets.

“Azure SQL Server data warehouse workloads needed a solution to eliminating VM and managed data disk IO bottlenecks. The Azure Elastic SAN solution removes the VM bandwidth bottleneck and boosts IO throughput. They reduced VM size and implemented constrained cores to save money on SQL server core licensing thanks to Elastic SAN performance.”

Moving your on-premises SAN to the Cloud Elastic SAN uses a resource hierarchy similar to on-premises SANs and allows provisioning of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput at the resource level, dynamically sharing performance across workloads, and workload-level security policy management. This makes migrating from on-premises SANs to the cloud easier than right-sizing hundreds or thousands of disks to serve your SAN’s many workloads.

The Azure-Sponsored migration tool by Cirrus Data Solutions in the Azure Marketplace simplifies data migration planning and execution. The cost optimization wizard in Cirrus Migrate Cloud makes migrating and saving even easier:

Azure is excited about Azure Elastic SAN’s launch and sees a real opportunity for companies to lower storage TCO. Over the last 18 months, they have worked with Azure to improve Cirrus Migrate Cloud so enterprises can move live workloads to Azure Elastic SAN with a click. Offering Cirrus Migrate Cloud to accelerate Elastic SAN adoption, analyze the enterprise’s storage performance, and accurately recommend the best Azure storage is an exciting expansion of their partnership with Microsoft and extends their vision of real-time block data mobility to Azure and Elastic SAN.

Cirrus Data Solutions Chairman and CEO Wayne Lam said that we work with Cirrus Data Solutions to ensure their recommendations cover all Azure Block Storage offerings (Disks and Elastic SAN) and your storage needs. The wizard will recommend Ultra Disk, which has the lowest sub-ms latency on Azure, for single queue depth workloads like OLTP.

Consolidate storage and achieve cost efficiency at scale Elastic SAN lets you dynamically share provisioned performance across volumes for high performance at scale. A shared performance pool can handle IO spikes, so you don’t have to overprovision for workload peak traffic. You can right-size to meet your storage needs with Elastic SAN because capacity scales independently of performance. If your workload’s performance requirements are met but you need more storage capacity, you can buy that (at 25% less cost) than more performance.

Get the lowest Azure VMware Solution GiB storage cost this recently announced preview integration lets you expose an Elastic SAN volume as an external datastore to your Azure VMware Solution (AVS) cluster to increase storage capacity without adding vSAN storage nodes. Elastic SAN provides 1 TiB of storage for 6 to 8 cents per GiB per month1, the lowest AVS storage cost per GiB. Its native Azure Storage experience lets you deploy and connect an Elastic SAN datastore through the Azure Portal in minutes as a first-party service.

Azure Container Storage, the first platform-managed container-native storage service in the public cloud, offers highly scalable, cost-effective persistent volumes built natively for containers. Use fast attach and detach. Elastic SAN can back up Azure Container Storage and take advantage of iSCSI’s fast attach and detach. Elastic SAN’s dynamic resource sharing lowers storage costs, and since your data persists on volumes, you can spin down your cluster for more savings. Containerized applications running general-purpose database workloads, streaming and messaging services, or CI/CD environments benefit from its storage.

Price and performance of Azure Elastic SAN Most throughput and IOPS-intensive workloads, like databases, suit elastic SAN. To support more demanding use cases, Azure raised several performance limits:

Azure saw great results with SQL Servers during their Preview. SQL Server deployments on Azure VMs sometimes require overprovisioning to reach disk throughput targets. Since Elastic SAN uses iSCSI to increase storage throughput over compute network bandwidth, this is avoided.

With dynamic performance sharing, you can cut your monthly bill significantly. Another customer wrote data to multiple databases during the preview. If you provision for the maximum IOPS per database, these databases require 100,000 IOPS for peak performance, as shown in the simplified graphic below. In real life, some database instances spike during business hours for inquiries and others off business hours for reporting. Combining these workloads’ peak IOPS was only 50,000.

Elastic SAN lets its volumes share the total performance provisioned at the SAN level, so you can account for the combined maximum performance required by your workloads rather than the sum of the individual requirements, which often means you can provision (and pay for) less performance. In the example, you would provision 50% fewer IOPS at 50,000 IOPS than if you served individual workloads, reducing costs.

Start Elastic SAN today Follow Azure start-up instructions or consult their documentation to deploy an Elastic SAN. Azure Elastic SAN pricing has not changed for general availability. Their pricing page has the latest prices.

Azure Storage: 2023 – A Year of Growth, Innovation, and Transformation

New year reflection and planning are common. Microsoft’s top priorities are improving Azure and its ecosystem, enabling groundbreaking AI solutions, and easing cloud migrations. Azure use custom storage solutions to meet your workload needs.

2023 was a big year for storage and data services, with customers focused on AI. New workloads and access patterns increased Azure customers’ data estate. Notable Azure Storage figures:

The storage platform reads and writes over 100 Exabyte’s of data and processes over 1 quadrillion transactions a month. Both numbers increased significantly from 2023.

Azure’s new general-purpose block storage for SQL, NoSQL, and SAP increased capacity 100-fold with premium SSD v2 disks.

Premium Files, their file offering for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and SAP, saw over 100% YoY growth in transactions.

Five strategic areas were advanced and invested in in 2023 to match customer workload patterns, cloud computing trends, and AI evolution.

New workload-focused innovations

Azure now offer end-to-end solutions with unique storage capabilities to help customers bring new workloads to Azure without retrofitting.

Customers’ workloads are moving from “stateless” to “stateful” as they modernize applications with Kubernetes. Azure Container Storage is optimized for stateful workloads with tight container integration, data management, lifecycle management, price-performance, and scale. The first platform-managed container-native public cloud storage service is Azure Container Storage. It allows Kubernetes native management of persistent volumes and backend storage.

Azure Elastic SAN: The Game Changer for Block Storage in the Cloud

Microsoft’s fully managed Azure Elastic SAN simplifies cloud SAN deployment, scaling, management, and configuration. It addresses customers’ service management issues when migrating large SAN appliances to the cloud. They are the first to offer a fully managed cloud SAN with cloud scale and high availability. It uses a SAN-like hierarchy to provision top-level resources, dynamically share resources across workloads, and manage security policies at the workload level. It also lets customers use Elastic SAN to store new data-intensive workloads in Azure VMware Solution. Elastic SAN and Azure Container Storage, in public preview, simplify service management for cloud native storage scenarios, advancing the paradigm. Plans call for general availability in the coming months.

New data-driven innovation is led by AI. Azure Blob Storage leads this data explosion with high performance and bandwidth for AI training. AI and machine learning (ML), IoT and streaming analytics, and interactive workloads benefit from Azure Premium Block Blob’s low latency and competitive pricing since 2019. In July, Microsoft released Azure Managed Lustre, a managed distributed parallel file system for HPC and AI training.

Microsoft Fabric’s storage layer, OneLake, uses Azure Data Lake Storage’s scale, performance, and rich capabilities. ADLS has transformed analytics with differentiated storage features like native file system capabilities that enable atomic meta data operations, which boost performance, especially when used with Azure Premium Block Blob. Multi-protocol access lets customers work with their data using REST, SFTP, and NFS v3, eliminating data silos, costly data movement, and duplication.

Mission-critical workload optimizations

Azure add differentiated capabilities to help enterprises optimize Azure-hosted mission-critical workloads. 

They are actively onboarding mission-critical data solutions since Premium SSD v2’s general availability. Gigaom noted SQL Server 2019’s better performance and lower TCO on Azure VMs with Premium SSD v2. PostgreSQL and other database workloads have similar benefits. The coming year will see Premium SSD v2 capabilities improved and regional coverage expanded.

AI model training and inference are among the largest mission-critical workloads powered by Azure Blob Storage. Scale-out platforms help cloud-native companies store Exabyte’s of consumer-generated data. To power recommendation engines and inventory systems, major retailers store trillions of user activities. The 2023 Cold storage tier makes data retention cost-effective.

Enterprises modernize Windows Server workloads in the cloud with enhanced Azure Files and File Sync. Modern applications can use identity-based authentication and authorization to access SMB file shares with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory support for Azure Files REST API) in preview. Azure Files supports Kerberos and REST authentication with on-premises AD and Microsoft Entra ID. Microsoft Entra ID Kerberos authentication, unique to Azure, allows seamless migration from on-premises Windows servers to Azure, preserving data and permissions and eliminating complex domain join setups.

Azure NetApp Files (ANF) meets performance and data protection needs for SAP and Oracle migrations.  Azure introduced the public preview of ANF large volumes up to 500 TiB in strategic partnership with NetApp to meet the needs of workloads that require larger capacity under a single namespace, such as HPC in Electronic Design Automation and Oil and Gas applications, and Cool Access to improve the TCO for infrequently accessed data.

Scalable data migration is essential for cloud workload migration. They offer complete migration solutions. Fully managed data migration service Azure Storage Mover improves large data set migration. Windows Servers and Azure Files can be synchronized hybridly with Azure File Sync. AZ Copy allows script-based migration jobs to be completed quickly, while Azure Data box allows offline data transfer.

Growing partner ecosystem

Partners who enhance their platform with innovative solutions help us move customer workloads to Azure. Azure are pleased to see partners investing in exclusive Azure solutions after many successful strategic partnerships.

The next version of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service, exclusive to Azure, leverages Azure Blob Storage’s scale and cost efficiency. This service supports Exabyte’s of data under a single namespace, surpassing other public cloud file solutions, and helps high-scale enterprise NAS data migration to Azure.

Commvault introduced an Azure-only cyber resilience solution. It helps users predict threats, recover cleanly, and respond faster. It works seamlessly with Azure OpenAI Service.

Since Pure Storage Cloud Block Storage launched on Azure in 2021, they have worked closely with them. The early adopters of Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disk storage use Azure Storage’s shared disks. They now collaborate on containers with Portworx and Azure VMware.

Azure offer storage migration solutions with Atempo, Data Dynamics, Komprise, and Cirrus Data, as well as storage and backup partners, to migrate petabytes of NAS and SAN data to Azure for free.

Industrial contributions

Azure work with industry leaders in SNIA and the Open Compute Platform (OCP) to share insights, influence standards, and develop innovative solutions and best practices.

Azure presented Massively Scalable Storage for Stateful Containers on Azure at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference, highlighting Azure Container Storage and Elastic SAN’s synergy. This combination provides unified volume management across diverse storage backends and a highly available block storage solution that scales to millions of IOPS with fast pod attach and detach.

Azure charted the future of flash as an HDD displacement technology at Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in alignment with Azure Storage long-term plans.

In the next decade, they aim for net carbon-zero emissions. Their OCP Sustainability Project provides an open framework for the datacenter industry to adopt reusability and circularity best practices and leads the steering committee to advance progress.

Unmatched quality commitment

Azure prioritize providing a solid storage foundation that can adapt to new workloads like AI and ML. This commitment ensures storage solution reliability, durability, scalability, and performance while lowering Azure customers’ TCO.

Azure invest heavily in infrastructure, hardware, software, and processes to ensure data durability. Azure Zone-redundant Storage (ZRS) guarantees data durability of at least 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) per year, the highest among major cloud service providers. Azure are the only major CSP cloud provider with a 0% Annual Failure Rate (AFR) for block storage since launch.

Our ZRS offering makes it easy to create highly available solutions across three zones at a low cost. A cross-zonal AKS cluster with ZRS disk-hosted persistent volumes ensures data durability and availability during zonal outages. ZRS provides high resiliency out of the box for clustered applications like SQL failover cluster instances (FCI) using Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC).

Azure integrated with Azure Copilot to improve customer support by helping support engineers troubleshoot faster and provide quality responses. This increased customer satisfaction significantly.