The wait (list) is over: Azure NetApp Files is enterprise-ready in your Azure portal

Four years ago we imagined what many said would be impossible: build a fully-managed, on-premises-like storage infrastructure service for the most demanding mission-critical workloads in Azure and make it available on-demand, anywhere in the world.

We would need speed, security, and scalability. We would need to pass the most stringent certifications and compliance criteria. And we would need to make it simple. IT specialists with minimal knowledge of storage should be able to migrate core workloads to Azure with little to no risk and manage those workloads in a seamless and deeply integrated way.

We announced the general availability of Azure NetApp Files in May 2019. Since then, we have worked with customers to successfully migrate and run some of their most important production workloads. Today, we are announcing the removal of the waiting list for this service. The capabilities, scale, performance, and cost-efficiency of Azure NetApp Files are unmatched in the cloud for ONTAP® workloads, and we look forward to continuing our work with customers to enable their most demanding applications.

First-party service in Azure

We delivered Azure NetApp Files as a Microsoft service, bringing together NetApp’s 30 plus years of ONTAP® innovation on bare-metal systems and Azure’s networking and service management experience. Our joint engineering teams worked hand-in-hand to deliver a great customer experience and ensure that we provided every feature an enterprise would need to trust their core, mission-critical workloads on the cloud. These are systems that run the lifeblood of any enterprise: sales orders, product development, finance, forecasting, supply chain, predictive analytics, imagery, robotics; even high-performing SAP, HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server database workloads.

We addressed cost by introducing three performance tiers. We designed the service to meet or exceed the scale and performance requirements of large and performance-sensitive applications. Customers can store up to 10 PB in a single deployment. They are achieving up to 4.4 GBps of throughput and consistent low latency as low as sub-ms with full data durability. And they have embraced Azure NetApp Files for their SAP workloads since it is the only Cloud File system certified for SAP HANA.

Over the past two-plus years since our GA, we have worked closely with customers to ensure the successful deployment and migration of their production workloads. We’ve listened closely to our customers and have continued to improve the service. We continue to release new capabilities, including backup and restore, cross-region replication, snapshot policies, and additional protocol support. See the following documentation to find all the recent releases for Azure NetApp Files.

Stories that prove our vision

Customers of all sizes have embraced Azure NetApp Files for a wide variety of scenarios. Here are a few of our customer stories:

• Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), a major global pharmacy and healthcare retail provider, migrated their massive SAP landscape—an estimated 100 TB—to Azure with Azure NetApp Files. WBA gained the high performance and storage capacity it needed for its mission-critical SAP HANA database infrastructure.
• Ferguson Enterprises, the largest supplier of plumbing and HVAC equipment and services in the United States, moved over 14,000 employees to remote work in a single weekend, with Azure Virtual Desktop running on Azure NetApp Files.
• Repsol, a global multi-energy company makes faster decisions relying on Azure NetApp Files—analytics that used to take a month to process, now take only a few hours.
• CONA, Coca-Cola North American bottling partner, realized significantly improved query performance, flexibility, and cost optimization following the migration of HANA environment to Azure Virtual Machine scale-out cluster with Azure NetApp Files, and strong collaboration with Microsoft and NetApp teams.

Try Azure NetApp Files yourself

It’s available now in your Azure portal. Discover what performance, agility, and innovation in Azure could look like for your enterprise. Take it for a test drive and let us know what you think at ANFfeedback@microsoft.com.

Source: Azure Blog Feed