Migrating business-critical file workloads to cloud got easy with Azure NetApp files
Do you want to move your enterprise file workload to cloud but at the same time also want to keep on premise like IOPS and throughput. Well, Azure NetApp files is the solution you are looking for.
It is an Azure native\first-party service delivered directly through the Azure Portal taking Benefit from NetApp’s legendary ONTAP data management capabilities. It offers a high-performance file-service environment for the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- Offers exceptionally high throughput
- ultra-low latency for Linux and Windows applications
- guarantees uptime of 99.9 %
Large number of file operations can be carried out with minimum latency
Currently, you need to be white-listed. This is actually being done on purpose because netapp files has guaranteed performance that they need to hit for which they need to be sure that there is enough capacity in the azure platform to satisfy the need.
ANF went GA in May 2019.
Hierarchy
You can find Azure NetApp files under Services in Azure portal once you are whitelisted. There are 3 key steps to be able to deploy ANF
- It all starts with creating a NetApp account first where you need to specify your subscription and a region. Currently, there is a limit of 10 NetApp account per region.
- Next step is to create a capacity pool. It is a logical space to reserve capacity where you need to define a minimum of 4TB and that can go up to 500TB. You also need to choose Service Level (standard, premium, ultra).
- Now, with these two in place, you are ready to create volumes.
The size of the volume can be from 100GB to 100TB but at the of provisioning the volume, size allowed to choose totally depends on how much quota is left in your capacity pool.
Apart from that, you need a network and a delegated subnet to be able to create volumes. Here the subnet is delegated to service Microsoft.NetApp/volumes.
Architecture
Residing in MSFT’s Azure datacenter, it’s hosting the NetApp internal operating system called ONTAP.
Azure portal is integrated with the ARM gateway. Below which they have ANF resource provider. All core services have this Resource Provider.
Underneath that, they have the Service Delivery Layer, this is just an orchestration layer that uses algorithm to handles requests like create, delete or update operation related to volumes and snapshots
Because of this native integration and the fact that its directly interacting with ARM you can also automate this service using native Azure API’s, the CLI, PowerShell and any supported SDKs.
Why ANF?
One of the key factor to opt for ANF is “it can be adopted with minimal redesigning”. Migrate and run complex, file-based applications with no code changes and very little training. One can find mounting instructions of the volume on Azure portal which allows users to immediately start working on ANF without investing much on research.
Cost is predictable as you pay for capacity pool — you can control the size of your capacity pool. You can resize based on the workload making capacity adjustment hassle free.
Performance is also predictable as you choose service levels.
Ultra — 128 MiB/s of throughput per 1 TiB of capacity
Premium — 64 MiB/s of throughput per 1 TiB of capacity
Standard — 16 MiB/s of throughput per 1 TiB of capacity
Throughput is determined by two factors and those factors are the Service level (Standard, Premium, Ultra) and size of the volume.
Service Level x Volume Size = Throughput
If you need to calculate throughput of the volume, get the volume size and service level of the capacity pool. You can do the math based on above formula.
Here is an example, if your capacity pool is Premium and volume size is 3TiB then
64MiB/s x 3 TiB = Upto 192 MiB/s is the throughput value
Protocols
ANF supports multiple protocols like Nfs3, Nfs4.1, SMB and Dual protocol (NFS and SMB)
When you provision NFS, you get up to 5 export policies. This allow users to lock down ANF for a very specific group of clients, IP addresses or IP ranges.
SMB is pretty simple because they use NTFS native SMB authentication and authorization. It has native integration with Active directory for allowing SMB volume creation. You need to declare AD configurations like Primary DNS, domain name and credentials of AD server. They support bring your own AD and Azure Active Directory Domain Services.
Features
ANF volumes are backed up using snapshot copies. As we know snapshots are basically point in time copy. Hence, they are space and time efficient and only consume space for any deltas. It is a matter of few seconds and snapshots are created irrespective of the volume size. There is a limit of 255 snapshots per volume.
You can restore a whole new volume from the snapshot which is available immediately. Snapshot revert functionality is also available which allows you to revert to a state when the snapshot was taken.
Snapshot policy feature enables user to create a policy and apply it to the volumes for taking scheduled snapshots which includes hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots
Cross region replication public preview was announced in September 2020. Snapshot is the core technology used for this feature. Users can opt for disaster recovery using cross region replication. This capability enables you to failover your critical application in case of a region-wide outage or disaster. There are fixed regional pairs for this purpose.
Metrics and Alerts
You can quickly get hold of usage and performance of the volume just by navigating to Metrics section of the volume in Azure Portal. It offers you usage metrics like volume consumed size and volume snapshot size along with performance metrics like Read/Write latency and IOPS.
Users can also set an alert if they don’t want to worry about running out of space. Just set a threshold and you will be notified if it reaches that particular value giving you enough time to act accordingly.
How secure ANF is?
ANF traffic never leaves an Azure DC or gets exposed to the public internet. This subnet is for routing purposes only, there is no performance impact.
It doesn’t have a public endpoint. It has a private IP and in order to access or mount a volume, you have to be within the overall Azure Framework. Its very secure.
Azure NetApp Files volumes are encrypted using the FIPS 140–2 standard. A unique XTS-AES-256 data encryption key is generated for each volume. All keys are managed by the Azure NetApp Files service.
What customers have to say about ANF?
Out of the three major cloud vendors, ANF is the only shared file system certified for use with SAP hana. Now that’s a big deal.
According to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, deployments are 30%-40% faster and outages are reduced by 80%. Enabling customer to adopt cloud in much faster way
Italgas is the leading gas distribution company in Italy and the third largest in Europe. Italgas adopted ANF because they feel it’s most flexible cloud storage solution with remarkable benefits like resize volumes very quickly without service disruption and Oracle database cloning takes seconds
VDI, VWD and container platforms are easily integrated with ANF
With Azure NetApp Files, you can hot-resize the volume to match size and performance needs, perform instant snapshots or volume clones, and change the volume tier dynamically, without service interruption, interactively or by automation.
Pricing
You pay by the hour. Pricing is on capacity pool and not volume. Also, it differs for every region.
Pricing for ANF can be calculated here — https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/?service=netapp
ANF is evolving rapidly as they keep adding features to the product. There is a what’s New page which provides information on what features have been recently added and keeps you up to date https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-netapp-files/whats-new
