Seeking Cost-Effective and Scalable Azure Storage Solution for Large-Scale Data Management Across Multiple VMs

Question

"I'm seeking recommendations for a cost-effective and scalable Azure storage solution to manage a large volume of data accessed by multiple virtual machines (VMs). It's crucial that the chosen solution supports direct file editing and offers seamless integration with VMs while optimizing costs for storing vast amounts of data. Additionally, how can this storage solution be effectively incorporated?"

Answer 1

@sindhu sneha This table will help you determine which Storage is the right choice for you for your scenario.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction#sample-scenarios-for-azure-storage-services

Azure Blobs allows unstructured data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs. Also, supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for enterprise big data analytics solutions.

When to use: You want your application to support streaming and random-access scenarios. You want to be able to access application data from anywhere. You want to build an enterprise data lake on Azure and perform big data analytics.

Azure Data Lake Storage is worth considering in your case when it comes to scalability and cost optimization. It allows cost optimization via independent scaling of storage and compute, lifecycle policy management, and object-level tiering

Data Lake Storage Gen2 provides file system semantics, file-level security, and scale. Because these capabilities are built on Blob storage, you also get low-cost, tiered storage, with high availability/disaster recovery capabilities.

It makes Azure Storage the foundation for building enterprise data lakes on Azure. Designed from the start to service multiple petabytes of information while sustaining hundreds of gigabits of throughput, Data Lake Storage Gen2 allows you to easily manage massive amounts of data.

Also, VMs can read and write data directly to the storage account, simplifying workflows.

Data Lake Storage Gen2 includes the following capabilities.

✓   Hadoop-compatible access

✓   Hierarchical directory structure

✓   Optimized cost and performance

✓   Finer grain security model

✓   Massive scalability

Additional reading:

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/data-lake-storage-best-practices#source-hardware
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction#sample-scenarios-for-azure-storage-services
3. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/create-data-lake-storage-account

---

Hope that helps.

If you have questions, please let me know in the "comments" and we would be happy to help you. Comment is the fastest way of notifying the experts.

Please don’t forget to "Accept Answer" and hit Yes for "was this answer helpful" wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members for remediation for similar issues.