The power of Azure Elastic Storage Area Network (SAN)

 

Introduction

In today's data world, to store the data on a proper storage solution where it will be more scalable and reliable. Microsoft Azure offers a range of storage services to meet these upcoming demands. Among them, Azure Elastic SAN play major role for enterprises scale requirements with high-performance storage with elasticity and scalability. Azure Elastic SAN is a fully integrated solution that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN, while also offering built-in cloud capabilities like high availability. Azure Elastic SAN will be finely working with many of the compute resources which provided by Azure such as Virtual Machine, Azure Kubernetes services, Azure VMware solution and reduces the deployment and manageability of individual storage services on azure.

Architecture Overview

Azure Elastic SAN leverages Azure Managed Disks as its underlying storage substrate. Managed Disks provide scalable, durable, and highly available block storage for VMs in Azure. Azure Elastic SAN will reduce complexities of managing storage infrastructure and offers a simplified, scalable solution for enterprise workloads.

At the core layer Azure Elastic SAN is a distributed storage architecture which consists of multiple fault-tolerant nodes distributed across fault domains and update domains within Azure regions. This architecture ensures resilience and high availability by replicating data across multiple nodes and leveraging Azure Redundancy.

Key Features of Azure Elastic SAN

• High Performance: Delivers High IOPs amount with low latency.
• Scalability: Workload capacity can be dynamically scaled up or down based on the demand.
• Data Protection: Data redundancy and high availability mechanisms leverage against the data loss & availability.
• Easy integration with azure services

Planning the deployment of Azure Elastic SAN

The major key aspects that we have to consider when we are deploying on Azure Elastic SAN.

• How much storage do you need?
• What level of performance do you need?
• What type of redundancy do you require?

Deployment Consideration

• Performance Requirement
• Redundancy 
• Network Consideration
• Security
• Migrations
• Monitoring & Management

The Two Major Layers that consists with the Elastic SAN

1. Volume Groups: Volume groups are management constructs that use to manage volumes at scale. Any settings or configurations applied to a volume group will be inherited by any volumes associated with that volume group.

2. Volumes: The volumes will be the partitioned the capacity of the Elastic SAN into individual volumes which can be mounted.

Supported Features for Azure Storage

Conclusion

Azure Elastic SAN offers a scalable, and high-performance storage solution for enterprise workloads in Azure. By understanding its architecture, key features, deployment considerations, organizations can effectively leverage Azure Elastic SAN to meet their storage requirements while ensuring performance, scalability, and data resilience in the cloud.