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Azure Storage

Overview

• Possibly the #1 use for Aure
• Multi-petabyte
• 2 Flavors
  • Azure Standard
  • Azure Premium
• Standard Storage Account (Magnetic based)
  • Durable and HA
  • Blob Object
    • Page Blobs
      • Acts as a Virtual Hard Disk
      • VHD Format
        • Compatible with Hyper-V and other technologies
        • 1 TB Max per disk, but can stripe multiple disks for more storage.
        • Up to 64 TB with G-Series VMs
      • Exact same storage technology/system used by Blob storage, so 3 copies, very durable.
      • Up to 64 TB with G-Series VMs
      • Up to 500 IOPs per disk
        • Very fast with striping – IOPs are added together.
      • Page B
  • File Storage
  • Table Storage
  • Queue Storage
• Premium Storage
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/premium-storage
  • B-series, DS-series, DSv2-series, DSv3-series, GS-series, Ls-series, M-series and Fs-series
  • High IOPs, SSD Based
  • Block Storage

HA

• Every block of data sychronously written to 3 separate physical “fault domains” within a Storage Stamp, within a Region.
  • Eliminates any Single Point of Failure
  • If one of the fault domains storage units fails, the remaining 2 continue to read and write while simultaneously rebuilding the failed drive.
• Geo-Replicated
  • Good for Disaster Recovery
  • Copies data Asychronously across different regions.
  • Remote copies also have 3 physical storage devices.

Page Blobs

• AWS EBS
• Acts as a Virtual Hard Disk
• VHD Format
  • Compatible with Hyper-V and other technologies
• 1 TB Max per disk, but can stripe multiple disks for more storage.
• Exact same storage technology/system used by Blob storage, so 3 copies, very durable.
• Up to 64 TB with G-Series VMs (Via striping)
• Up to 500 IOPs per disk
  • Very fast with striping – IOPs are added together.

VMs & Page Blobs

• Root storage is stored as a Page Blob (Windows C:\ or Linux /)
  • Includes a Host Level disk cache for frequently accessed data
• VM gets a Temporary Disk (Windows D:\ or Linux ‘swap’)
  • Ephemeral – lost on reboot
  • Not persistently backed to Blob Storage
  • Do Not Use for anything you need to keep!
• Persistent data should be stored to additional Page Blob disks: E:\, F:\, etc.
  • Possible to Terminate a VM or just shut it down (deallocated state) but keep the data disks
    • In De-allocated state:
      • Not reserving any CPU, Memory, IP addresses, etc.
      • No ‘Compute’ costs

Azure Files

• AWS EFS
• SMB 3.0 or CIFS
  • The Common Internet File System (CIFS) is the standard way that computer users share files across corporate intranets and the Internet. An enhanced version of the Microsoft open, cross-platform Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, CIFS is a native file-sharing protocol in Windows 2000.
• No need to spin up File Servers – works automatically
• Shared location between VMs
  • Configurations
  • Common Logs
  • Web Applications
• Maps the same as any other mount location (G:\, /mnt/share, etc.)

Azure Premium Storage

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/premium-storage

• AWS Provisioned IOPs
• All SSD
• Low Latency, predictable IO throughput
  • Single digit millisecond latencies
• Up to 1TB blob/disk size
  • Stripe up to 64 disks for 64TB
    • more than 84,000 IOPs
• Designed to be used with specific classes of VMs
  • DS & GS
    • ‘S’ stands for SSD
    • These have high speed connectivity back to the storage devices.

Storage Accounts

• 500 TiB MAXIMUM per Storage Account
  • To increase storage, you need more Storage Accounts
    • Max 200 Storage Accounts per subscription
• Require a unique name (globally?)
• Deployment Model
  • Resource Manager or Classic
• Account Kind
  • General Purpose
    • V1
      • All types discussed above
      • Cannot do Hot/Cool
      • Slightly lower cost per transaction than v2
      • Works in Classic model
    • V2
      • All types discussed above
      • CAN do hot / cool
      • Recommended
      • Does not work in Classic Model (ARM only)
  • Blob Storage (S3?)
    • Access Tier
      • Cool – Infrequently Accessed (Lower cost tier)
        • Same Durability and Performance
        • Charge per GB Read – Pay to access (AWS IA)
      • Hot – Standard S3
• Performance
  • Standard or Premium
    • Grayed out when not available
• Replication
  • Locally-redundant storage (LRS) (Default, 3 synchronous writes)
    • Fastest
  • Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
    • For Block Blob storage
    • Stored in multiple zones within an Azure Region (something like “multi-AZ”?)
  • Geo-redundant (GRS)
  • Read-Access Geo-Redundant (RA-GRS)
  • Use Cases
    • Objects (Block blobs, queues, tables)
      • GRS or RA-GRS
    • VHDs (Especially with high IOPs requirements)
      • LRS
    • Images or backup copies of VHDs
      • GRS

Managed Disks

Azure Managed vs Unmanaged disks : The choice

This is not part of the training, due to the age of the course.

Managed Disks

Storage CLI

List all available commands

azure storage --help

View all available storage accounts

azure storage account list

Create a new Storage Account

azure storage account create  --resource-group  --sku-name <GRS/LRS/etc> --location  --kind <storage>