Azure Storage

Table of Contents

Azure Storage Services

It is a IaaS type of service.

  1. Container (Blob) storage
  2. Disk storage - for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs)
  3. Azure File Storage
  4. Storage tiers

Azure Storage (GPv2)

  1. Standard storage
  2. Subdivided into four types of data it can store
    1. Container storage (blob storage)
    2. File
    3. Queue
    4. Table
  3. Can hold up to 5 Petabytes (5 million GB)
  4. Pay for what you use
  5. ~2 cents per GB per month
  6. Extremely cheap cloud storage
  7. Not recommended for high-demand workloads

Data Lake

  1. A setting when creating a GPv2 storage act
  2. A data lake is extremely large storage
  3. Can hold petabytes and exabytes
  4. Good for “big data” analytics

Premium Storage Options

  1. More expensive
  2. Blob storage - can only hold containers (blobs)
    1. Can choose block blobs or page blobs
  3. File storage
  4. Uses premium SSD (solid state disks)
  5. Triple the “operations per second” (OPS)
  6. Lower latency (time to first byte)

High Performance

  1. Premium SSD
  2. Premium SSD v2
  3. Ultra Disk

Container (Blob) storage

  1. BLOB - Binary Large Object
  2. These are files of any type (TXT, PDF, ZIP, CSV, XLSX, JPG, AVI, etc.)
  3. Stored loosely in a container
  4. Public or private
  5. “Unstructured data”
  6. Create multiple containers
  7. Each container can contain blobs
  8. Can be organized into folders (yes and no - not a real hierarchy)
  9. Only pay for what you use

Location

  1. You can create multiple storage accounts in any region of the world
  2. Keep your data close to the person/service consuming it (for access speed reasons)
  3. Price varies by region

Redundancy

  1. Azure keeps 3 copies of your data by default
  2. Locally- or zone-redundant
  3. Azure will almost never, ever lost a file once it has successfully received it

Global redundancy

  1. You can choose global redundancy for storage
  2. Azure keeps 6 copies of your data
  3. 3 locally, and 3 in another region of the “geo”
  4. Honors data sovereignty laws

Access Tiers

Four access tiers

  1. Hot - the default, balanced access
  2. Cool - can be set as default, cheaper storage with more expensive read/write operations
  3. Cold - much cheaper storage, more expensive read/write operations
  4. Archive - cannot get immediate access to files, cheapest storage, most expensive operations

Failover

  1. Hard disks fail every so often
  2. Azure takes care of this without you doing anything
  3. 3 copies of your data, they can recreate a hard disk behind the scenes

AzCopy

  1. Lets us copy/move files between cloud storage accounts within Azure (without having to download them to your local machine and uploading them again)
  2. Download this tool on to your computer or use the CLI from the Azure account

Azure Files

  1. True hierarchical structure with folders
  2. You can “mount” this storage to a server and use a drive letter with it (i.e. “S:drive”) - Windows, Linux, MacOS
  3. Supports SMB, or NFS (Linux)

Why use this as opposed to Container Storage?

  1. Replace or supplement your on-prem file storage
  2. Life and shift migration to the cloud
  3. Adds redundancy, data recovery, failover benefits

Azure File Sync

  1. Hybrid option - on prem files with cloud option
  2. Cloud tiering
  3. Distributed access
  4. Cloud backup

Azure Migrate

Guided experience to get your workloads into Azure

Azure Data Box

  1. To upload very large volumes of data into Azure
    1. 10 TB will take about 11 days at 65Mbps upload speed
  2. It is impractical to upload some quantities of data
  3. Data Box options from Azure
    1. Data Box - 100 TB
    2. Data Box Disk - 8 TB
    3. Data Box Heavy - 1 PB
  4. Encrypted, wiped clean after each use

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