Microsoft Azure File Services More and More Comprehensive

A few months before the end of 2017, we’re able to anticipate a bit and say that 2017 has been the year of Microsoft Azure (for the cloud), no doubt, just imagine the number of companies who announced the support of Azure with their product with the so famous multi-cloud effort.

Taneja has recently run a end-user survey that also illustrates the AWS and Microsoft Azure leadership from an end-user perspective.

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Microsoft continues to enhance the service with plenty of new modules, functions, and one of the recent interesting one is Azure File Services within Azure.

First, during SNIA SDC conference, David Goebel, software engineer at Microsoft, did a presentation about Azure File Services (aka AFS but not related to Andrew File System) essentially based on SMB. AFS is not the Windows SMB running on Azure nodes but a completely new SMB server implementation based on Azure Tables and Blobs for the backing store, Tables for metadata and Blobs for file data.

Current limits and characteristics:

• SMB 3.0 with encryption and persistent handles,
• 5TB per share and 1TB per file,
• 1,000 IO/s limit per share, ~60MB/s typical,
• some NTFS features not yet supported

Also more recently during NetApp Insight US conference in Vegas, NetApp and Microsoft jointly unveiled Enterprise NFS Service on Azure, powered by NetApp, illustrating a strategic partnership. Supporting v3 and v4 of the protocol, the service can be managed, provisioned, automated and scaled via a RESTful API in order to leverage cloud and hybrid deployment models. Futures additional services will be snapshots.

Nothing similar is yet announced on AWS, wait and see…