File Storage on Azure

• Dual-protocol support: Support for both Linux and Windows file shares, allowing customers to choose the protocol that best meets their application requirements.
• Lower risk: On-demand capacity and performance changes can be made in seconds without any time-consuming data copy, allowing you to control cloud storage costs right-sized to your applications.
• Freedom to grow: Spin up to 100TB in seconds, including extremely high-performance storage.
• Full management: Azure NetApp Files takes care of storage management for you, providing all the setup, configuration, and updates.
• Reliable database storage: For all major database systems including SAP, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server (over SMB).
• Simple, seamless experience: A seamless Azure experience for your file services workloads. You can deploy and manage Azure NetApp Files directory from the Azure Portal or automate using the Azure API or CLI integration.
• Data security you can trust: Built-in capabilities ensure your data is always protected in Azure: from always-on encryption to point-in-time data copies (without added capacity costs).

Azure NetApp Files is a highly available and enormously scalable platform for creating cloud-based file-share environments. By virtue of NetApp’s long-running experience of delivering enterprise, on-premises NAS solutions, Azure NetApp Files comes with a complete range of supporting features, including...

• Linux file environments including connections over both NFSv3 and NFSv4.1
• Windows applications via SMB with Active Directory integration
• Export and security policy support
• Advanced enterprise management features such as fast, highly efficient Snapshot copies and instant dataset cloning
• Together with NetApp data replication services, customers can easily get their data in and out of their Azure NetApp Files environments with ease

These features save users time and money deploying and running applications in that cloud that require file services. From both a performance and efficiency standpoint, Azure NetApp Files lets organizations focus technical resources on innovation rather than administration delivering more value to their organization.

Protecting data means starting with a simple, fast and efficient foundation. This often starts with a Snapshot copy. And guess what? Not all snapshots are created equally.

NetApp invented SnapShot copies nearly 30 years ago and found a way to protect your data almost instantly with a point-in-time version that essentially isn’t even a copy – and it’s incredibly cost efficient. When you take a NetApp Snapshot copy, the data is locked in place. No copy needed. All following changes, or deltas, start a new variant of the data until the next Snapshot copy. Then a third delta variant is created, and so on and so forth. This is a very efficient way of protecting your data. And guess what? In the cloud it becomes ever more important. Not only does the instant “copy” not impact the performance of your application – because it takes no space – you are also not paying additional dollars for every Snapshot copy taken. You can take hundreds a day and the cost impact is almost zero. That’s how you do data protection right! From there you can take advantage of further features such as cloning and cross region replication technology. To better understand how Azure NetApp Files Snapshot technology works, read more below.