As business functions are becoming more and more data driven, ensuring the availability and reliability of the storage layer is a top priority for enterprises. There are a number of enterprise-class data storage solutions that cater to these requirements for high availability on Azure.
What data resiliency features does Azure storage offer out of the box? In this blog we’ll explore the data resiliency capabilities of Azure storage, how they protect your data from regional and zonal failures, and help meet stringent availability demands.
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Azure resiliency can be broadly defined as the capability of the platform to recover from failures. These failures can either be local to the resource, zonal or affecting entire Azure regions. While certain resiliency features are in-built into the platform, it is also expected that customers design the application architecture in a way that resources are deployed with no single point of failure.
For example, application servers need to be deployed across different zones, front-ended by load balancers and use zone-resilient storage.
To protect against planned and unplanned outages, Azure storage maintains several copies of your data by default. The number of data copies and their location depends on the storage type selected. Do note that a higher number of copies will have a direct impact on costs and hence this tradeoff has to be evaluated before selecting the storage type.
Based on your application design, you also need to identify the access pattern for storage. For example, note whether your application needs read access from secondary storage, or if the application needs data to be replicated to a different region for disaster recovery. We will explore some of the data resiliency capabilities offered by Azure storage for these use cases in the next section.
Azure storage represents a pool of storage resources consisting of blobs, file shares, tables, and queues. Depending on the number of copies, regions, resiliency, and access patterns, customers can choose from the following Azure storage types.
Azure resiliency designs require that access to data be uninterrupted in the event of any planned or unplanned maintenance activities or outages. This requires storage account failover to be possible so that the additional copies of data can be accessed by applications for business continuity.
Let’s explore some of the possible outage scenarios and how storage account failovers happen in such cases.
Varying design patterns can be leveraged to ensure Azure redundancy and resiliency. While designing applications, consider the resiliency at each layer. This article has largely focused on deploying applications in different zones or regions to ensure resiliency, such as Azure geo-replication. It is also possible to create more resiliency by configuring Azure auto scaling, using Azure load balancer to handle incoming traffic, and leveraging native Azure scalability features to ensure availability even during usage spikes.
For another Azure HA use case, read about Azure proximity placement groups here.
NetApp BlueXP Cloud Volumes ONTAP delivers the trusted NetApp storage management capabilities in Azure, with enterprise-class performance, security, and resiliency. Cloud Volumes ONTAP can be deployed in a resilient architecture that can help you achieve an RPO of zero and RTO of less than 60 seconds.
The Azure high availability deployment of Cloud Volumes ONTAP uses a dual-node architecture, where data is synchronously replicated between two redundant nodes to avoid a single point of failure. You can also configure HA pairs in active-active configuration so that clients can access data from both the nodes. The deployment can also be done in an active-passive deployment, where the read requests are handled by the passive node.
Should service ever be disrupted, the data can still be accessed from one of the nodes. Cloud Volumes ONTAP eliminates the requirement of complex application high availability configurations as the storage layer is resilient from failures.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP ensures the much-needed resiliency for business critical applications in Azure with minimal operational overhead. It can be used to host enterprise databases such as SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, and NoSQL databases. It helps to ensure high availability of your DevOps and container ecosystem through easy integration with solutions such as Azure Kubernetes Service. With multi-protocol support Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a trusted solution that can cater to common enterprise requirements for home directories, VDI, application shared drives, and much more.
Ensuring data resilience is becoming a non-negotiable requirement. For Azure users, there are many options available, each with a vary level of resilience. But some enterprises will need to go even further than the out-of-the-box data resilience offered by Azure.
In addition to the native availability offered by Azure at the storage level, Cloud Volumes ONTAP high availability configuration provides an additional level of resiliency for mission-critical workloads in Azure. With minimal (less than 60 seconds) recovery time, zero data loss and seamless failover process, Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps meet your Azure data resiliency goals. Cloud Volumes ONTAP's integrated storage efficiency, security, and data protection capabilities ensure that you get a great value proposition for your cloud storage spend.