Azure Cloud Storage Options for High-Performance Workloads

Organizations migrate mission-critical workloads from on-premises environments to the Azure Cloud for many reasons, including scaling services in response to unpredictable demand, the ability to quickly provision resources, and leveraging economies of scale. It also provides disaster recovery (DR) strategies that ensure high availability and data resilience.?

Azure Cloud Storage offers numerous benefits over legacy storage systems in on-premises data centers:

• Scalability?
• High Availability
• Security
• Cost-Effectiveness
• Global Reach

Use Cases for High-Performance Azure Cloud Storage

Azure Cloud Storage is well-suited for a wide range of use cases across industries, including:

• E-commerce: Azure can be leveraged for e-commerce storage to store product images, catalogs, and user-generated content for online retail, with built-in CDN integration for fast, scalable delivery to global audiences.
• Big Data Analytics: Azure is designed for storing and analyzing large volumes of structured and unstructured data
• Azure VMware Solution: For organizations looking to migrate virtualized workloads to the cloud, Azure VMware Solution (AVS) provides a fully consistent VMware platform that allows them to ‘lift and shift’ to Azure without time-consuming, expensive application refactoring.

Strengths and Shortcomings for Native Storage Options on Azure

Azure offers a variety of high-performance storage options, each with its strengths and weaknesses:

• Local NVMe devices: local NVMe storage provides fast storage performance with low latency and high throughput. This makes it ideal for workloads that require rapid access to data, such as high performance databases in the cloud, analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Shortcomings: lacks data protection, has scaling limitations, and lacks data services. Local NVMe storage on Azure VMs does not natively support data services like snapshots.
• Azure Managed Disks: simplify the management of storage for VMs and improve reliability. Shortcomings: performance limitations in the form of predefined throughput and IOPS limits, users pay for provisioned IOPS and throughput, and data services are only available on premium storage options.
• Azure Elastic SAN: can scale to petabytes of data without the need for upfront investment in hardware or infrastructure, resiliency and availability. Shortcomings: performance limitations (IOPS and latency), based on legacy, slow iSCSI storage protocol with single-digit millisecond latency, lacks essential data services.

Azure Managed Application for Turnkey Operations

In addition to its core Azure Cloud Storage Services, Azure also offers managed applications that simplify the deployment, management, and monitoring of Azure Cloud Storage resources. Managed applications are designed to simplify the deployment and management of complex, multi-tiered applications by encapsulating all the necessary resources, configurations, and dependencies into a single package.

Lightbits block storage on Azure is available through the Marketplace as a Managed Application, making it as easy to provision and manage as Azure’s native cloud storage offerings. You choose the size of the virtual machines and the number of nodes in your cluster and you are ready to go. As a fully managed service, Lightbits controls operations within your Azure subscription and manages the storage with self-healing, auto-scaling, replication, rolling upgrades, and other critical functions performed behind the scenes to ensure availability, performance, and data protection. By leveraging this managed block storage in the cloud solution, you can reduce operational overhead, improve resource utilization, and accelerate time-to-value.

To learn more about Lightbits for Azure Cloud Storage read the blog, "An Introduction to Azure Cloud Storage with Use Cases"