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Running ISV file services in Azure

Azure offers various options for storing file data. Azure native services are:

  • Azure Files – Fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard SMB and NFS protocols. Azure Files offer two different types (standard and premium) with different performance characteristics.
  • Azure NetApp Files – Fully managed file shares in the cloud designed to meet the performance requirements for enterprise line-of-business applications. Azure NetApp Files offer multiple service levels with different performance limitations (standard, premium, and ultra).
  • Azure Blob Storage – large-scale object storage platform for storing unstructured data. Azure Blob Storage offer two different types (standard and premium) with different performance characteristics.

There are several articles that describe the differences and recommendation on selecting the native file service. You can learn more:

Many independent software vendor (ISV) solutions can provide file services in Azure. This article addresses two topics:

  • provides general considerations on selecting file services
  • outlines the differences between ISV solutions.

Full list of verified ISV solutions is available on Azure Storage partners for primary and secondary storage.

Considerations

When selecting the best solution for running a file services in Azure, several considerations are important.

Basic considerations

Basic functionality consideration examines the most common functionalities of the underlying storage platforms. This step is done initially to explore what solutions provide the basic functionality we need to satisfy our requirements. Important basic features vary from case to case. The most common ones are protocol support, namespace size, automatic tiering, encryption, WORM support, and authentication. You can see the list of basic functionalities that our ISV solutions support in feature comparison.

Performance considerations

After selecting which solution satisfies basic functionality, required performance must be considered. Estimating performance fit depends on three basic performance characteristics:

  • Latency
  • Bandwidth
  • IOPS or TPS

Importance of basic performance characteristics depends on the concurrency of the workloads (number of requests in parallel) and the block size (request size).

Workload type Recommendations
Low concurrency Latency is the most critical consideration. Smaller the latency, more performance can be achieved. In workloads with low concurrency, IOPS and bandwidth limitations are rarely crossed
High concurrency Latency impact is much smaller because of high concurrency. IOPS and / or bandwidth must be considered.
Block size For workloads with small block sizes, IOPS limits are more important to consider while bandwidth limits are more important for workloads with large block sizes.

Any storage workload can be described with those characteristics in mind. For example, OLTP workloads typically have high concurrency and small block sizes. HPC workloads usually have high concurrency, but block size can vary, from small to large.

Some general rules are always recommended:

  • Protocol selection: if possible, use SMB3 with multichannel support or NFSv3 with nconnect support as that will provide better performance. Avoid using legacy protocols both from performance, but also security considerations. Also note that clients can be tuned as well and is recommended to maximize the performance.
  • Networking: if VM type supports it, use accelerated networking. It will reduce the latency and always have a positive effect on the performance.
  • VM type: select the VM type that is most suitable for the workload. If the workload has small number of clients, running file services in smaller number of larger VMs is better suited. In contrast, large number of clients can benefit from running file services in larger number of smaller VMs.
  • For low concurrency and small block size workloads explore solutions that:
    • use managed disks (Premium or Ultra SSD disks) or
    • have a suitable caching algorithm.
  • For high concurrency and large block size workloads, explore solutions that use Azure Blob Storage as a backend

ISV solutions: overview and example use cases

This article compares several ISV solutions that provide files services in Azure.

Solution Overview Example use cases
Nasuni UniFS is an enterprise file service with a simpler, low-cost, cloud alternative built on Microsoft Azure - Primary file storage
- Departmental file shares
- Centralized file management
- multi-site collaboration with global file locking
- Azure Virtual Desktop
- Remote work/VDI file shares
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP optimizes your cloud storage costs, and performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance. Includes enterprise-grade data management, availability, and durability - Business applications
- Relational and NoSQL databases
- Big Data & Analytics
- Persistent data for containers
- CI/CD pipelines
- Disaster recovery for on-premises NetApp solutions
Panzura CloudFS is an enterprise global file system with added resiliency and high-performance. Offers ransomware protection. - Simplified legacy storage replacement
- Backup and disaster recovery, with granular recovery ability
- Cloud native access to unstructured data for Analytics, AI/ML.
- Multi-site file collaboration, with automatic file locking and real time global file consistency
- Global remote work with cloud VDI
- Accelerated cloud migration for legacy workloads
Qumulo Qumulo on Azure offers multiple petabytes (PiB) of storage capacity, and up to 20 GB/s of performance per file system. Windows (SMB) and Linux (NFS) are both natively supported, and Qumulo provides onboard real-time workload analytics. – Primary file storage for High Performance Compute, Media & Entertainment, Genomics, Electronic design, and Financial modeling.
Tiger Technology Tiger Bridge is a data management software solution. Provides tiering between an NTFS file system and Azure Blob Storage or Azure managed disks. Creates a single namespace with local file locking. - Cloud archive
- Continuous data protection (CDP)
- Disaster Recovery for Windows servers
- Multi-site sync and collaboration
- Remote workflows (VDI)
- Native access to cloud data for Analytics, AI, ML
WEKA WEKA Data Platform provides a fast, and scalable file storage system with a software-defined approach to data. It accelerates storage performance, reduces cloud storage costs, and simplifies data operations across on-premises, and cloud environments. - Enterprise, and Generative AI
- High-Performance Computing (HPC)
- Containerized workloads
- Tiering, backup, and disaster recovery (DR) from on-premises WEKA systems
XenData Cloud File Gateway creates a highly scalable global file system using windows file servers - Global sharing of engineering and scientific files
- Collaborative video editing

ISV solutions comparison

Supported protocols

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
SMB 2.1 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
SMB 3.0 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
SMB 3.1 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
NFS v3 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
NFS v4.1 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
iSCSI No Yes No No Yes No No

Supported services for persistent storage

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
Managed disks No Yes Yes No Yes No No
Unmanaged disks No No No No Yes No No
Azure Storage Block blobs Yes Yes (tiering) Yes No Yes Yes (tiering, snapshots) Yes
Azure Storage Page blobs No Yes (for HA) Yes Yes No No No
Azure Archive tier support No No Yes No Yes No Yes
Files accessible in non-opaque format No No No No Yes No Yes

Extended features

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
Operating Environment UniFS ONTAP PFOS Qumulo Core Windows Server WekaFS Windows Server
High-Availability Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (requires setup) Yes Yes
Automatic failover between nodes in the cluster Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (windows cluster) Yes Yes (windows cluster)
Automatic failover across availability zones Yes No Yes No Yes (windows cluster) No Yes (windows cluster)
Automatic failover across regions Yes (with Nasuni support) No No No Yes (windows cluster) No Yes (windows cluster)
Snapshot support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Consistent snapshot support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Integrated backup Yes Yes (Add-on) No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Versioning Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes
File level restore Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Volume level restore Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes
WORM Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No
Automatic tiering Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Global file locking Yes Yes (NetApp Global File Cache) Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Namespace aggregation over backend sources Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Caching of active data Yes Yes Yes Yes yes Yes Yes
Supported caching modes LRU, manually pinned LRU LRU, manually pinned Predictive LRU Linux page cache LRU
Encryption at rest Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Deduplication Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No
Compression Yes Yes Yes No No No No

Authentication sources

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
Microsoft Entra ID support Yes (via AD DS) Yes (via AD DS) Yes (via AD DS) Yes Yes (via AD DS) Yes (via AD DS) Yes (via AD DS)
Active directory support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
LDAP support Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Management

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
REST API Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Web GUI Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No

Scalability

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
Maximum number of nodes in a single cluster 100 2 (HA) Tested up to 60 nodes 100 N / A 100 per Proximity Placement Group N / A
Maximum number of volumes 800 1024 Unlimited N / A N / A 1024 1
Maximum number of snapshots Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited N / A 24000 per namespace N / A
Maximum size of a single namespace Unlimited Depends on infrastructure Unlimited Unlimited N / A 14 EiB N / A

Licensing

Nasuni NetApp CVO Panzura Qumulo Tiger Technology WEKA XenData
BYOL Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Azure Benefit Eligible No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No
Deployment model (IaaS, SaaS) IaaS IaaS IaaS SaaS IaaS IaaS IaaS

Other features

Nasuni

  • Marketplace
  • Can use managed disks for caching data
  • Centralized Management of all Edge Appliances
  • Unlimited file versioning history
  • Unlimited file system size
  • Unlimited file size
  • Access files Via HTTPS, REST API, and FTP
  • Load balance multiple filers with Azure Load Balancer
  • Encryption with Customer-Managed Keys
  • Supports third-party security and auditing Tools (for example, Varonis, Stealthbits)
  • White glove deployment and professional services

NetApp

  • Marketplace
  • De-duplication savings passed on to customer via reduced infrastructure consumption

Panzura

  • Marketplace
  • Byte Level Locking (multiple simultaneous R/W opens)

Qumulo

Tiger Technology

  • Marketplace
  • Invisible to applications
  • Partial Restore
  • Windows Shell integration (overlay, context menu, property sheet)
  • Azure Soft Delete and undelete support
  • Option to apply renames to the cloud target
  • Partial write to objects
  • Ransomware protection

WEKA

  • Marketplace
  • Consistent high performance at scale to accelerate Enterprise AI, Generative AI, and HPC workflows
  • WEKA Cloud Deployment Manager, and Terraform driven automated deployment, and scaling
  • Automated data tiering, and snapshots to Azure blob storage
  • Supports POSIX, NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols
  • Supports data encryption in flight, and at rest

XenData

  • The Azure Cosmos DB service provides fast synchronization of multiple gateways, including application-specific owner files for global collaboration
  • Each gateway has highly granular control of locally cached content
  • Supports video streaming and partial file restores
  • Supports Azure Data Box uploads
  • Encryption provided by Azure Blob Storage

Next steps

Learn more: