What is Azure Storage Mover?
Azure Storage Mover is a new, fully managed migration service that enables you to migrate your files and folders to Azure Storage while minimizing downtime for your workload. You can use Storage Mover for different migration scenarios such as lift-and-shift, and for cloud migrations that you have to repeat occasionally. Azure Storage Mover also helps maintain oversight and manage the migration of all your globally distributed file shares from a single storage mover resource.
Supported sources and targets
The current Azure Storage Mover release supports migrations from NFS shares on a NAS or server device within your network to an Azure blob container.
Important
Storage accounts with the hierarchical namespace service (HNS) feature enabled are not supported at this time.
An Azure blob container without the hierarchical namespace service feature doesn’t have a traditional file system. A standard blob container supports “virtual” folders. Files in folders on the source get their path prepended to their name and placed in a flat list in the target blob container.
The Storage Mover service represents empty folders as an empty blob in the target. The metadata of the source folder is persisted in the custom metadata field of this blob, just as they are with files.
Fully managed migrations
A single storage mover resource deployed to your subscription can be used to manage migrations for your source shares located in different parts of the world. The storage mover resource itself doesn't process your files and folders. Rather, you deploy a migration agent near your source share to send your data directly to the selected targets in Azure.
Azure Storage Mover provides a set of management resources that can be used across every share you intend to migrate. For example, you can express your migration plan and retain oversight about migration progress and results on a per-share basis. To take advantage of this capability, create a migration project for every workload you migrate. Within the project, define the source, target, and migration settings for each source share on which your workload depends. You can remain in full control about when to start the migration of a share, track it's progress, and see its results.
The resource hierarchy article has more information about individual Storage Mover resources and how best to use them for your migration. You can also get more deployment planning details in the planning for an Azure Storage Mover deployment article.
A hybrid cloud service
Azure Storage Mover is a hybrid cloud service. Hybrid services have both a cloud service component and an infrastructure component. The service administrator runs the infrastructure component in their corporate environment. For Storage Mover, that hybrid component consists of a migration agent. Agents are virtual machines, deployed to and run on a host near the source storage. To learn more about the agent and how it's deployed, read the Storage Mover agent deployment article.
Except for the agent registration process, all aspects of a migration are managed from the cloud service. Details about the agent registration process are available within the agent registration article.
Next steps
The following articles can help you become more familiar with the Storage Mover service.
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