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Microsoft announced several infrastructure-related feature enhancements for Azure Storage at the recent Build conference. I will discuss what these features are and what we might expect from them.
The big news first, Microsoft is starting a preview for 4TB disks for Azure virtual machines. This preview is starting off in the West Central US region and will expand globally in June. Administration is limited to PowerShell and CLI initially. Support will be coming to the Azure Portal soon after.
Microsoft Announced 4TB Azure Virtual Machine Disks [Image Credit: Microsoft]
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If you are working with unmanaged disks, then larger disks require larger storage accounts. We are keeping more data than ever and some infrastructure services, such as ASR and Azure Backup, use storage accounts.
Microsoft has announced that storage accounts, which are currently limited to 500TB each, will expand with a preview this summer of up to 5PB. Throughput will also increase:
Hopefully, these speed improvements will benefit backup and restore times for virtual machines and item-levels in Azure Backup.
Microsoft Announced Larger and Faster Storage Accounts [Image Credit: Microsoft]
Today, we can deploy two kinds of storage accounts:
A general usage storage account can be used for all kinds, such as virtual hard disks like Azure Files. This is not a file server in the cloud. It can also be used for Standard IO – Block Blob, which is a form of blob or at-rest file.
Blob storage allows us to choose a specific usage and pricing tier for blob storage. We can use hot blob for cost effective storage of frequently accessed data and cool blob storage for infrequently accessed data.
The problem with hot versus cool storage is that we do not always know the access rates of our data. Some data is accessed constantly, some not so much, which can change in unpredictable ways. We can change the tier of the storage account but the access rates of individual blobs can be different. As cheap as cool blob storage is, Amazon has a cheaper ice tier of storage.
Microsoft Announced Tiered Blob Storage in Azure [Image Credit: Microsoft]
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A storage account is an internet service. The storage account has a globally unique DNS name and is accessible to anyone with the name and an access key. The access key is long and strong but that is not enough for many customers. They want to restrict where a storage account can be accessed from.
Network access control for storage accounts will limit which Azure virtual networks or Internet/LAN IP addresses and ranges can access a storage account. This is good to know in case an access key is compromised.
Azure Storage Accounts Will Have Network Access Control [Image Credit: Microsoft]
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