Introduction

  • 3 minutes

Before creating a volume in Azure NetApp Files, you must purchase and set up a pool for provisioned capacity. To set up a capacity pool, you must have a NetApp account.

Watch this video to understand how storage hierarchy works in Azure NetApp Files.

NetApp accounts

  • A NetApp account serves as an administrative grouping of the constituent capacity pools.
  • A NetApp account isn't the same as your general Azure storage account.
  • A NetApp account is regional in scope.
  • You can have multiple NetApp accounts in a region, but each NetApp account is tied to only a single region.

Capacity pools

  • A capacity pool is measured by its provisioned capacity.
  • The capacity is provisioned by the fixed SKUs that you purchased (for example, a 4-TiB capacity).
  • A capacity pool can have only one service level.
  • Each capacity pool can belong to only one NetApp account. However, you can have multiple capacity pools within a NetApp account.
  • You can't move a capacity pool across NetApp accounts.
  • You can't delete a capacity pool until you delete all volumes within the capacity pool.
  • You can configure Standard, Premium, or Ultra service-level capacity pools with the cool access option. For more information about cool access, see Azure NetApp Files storage with cool access.

Quality of Service (QoS) types for capacity pools

The QoS type is an attribute of a capacity pool. It provides the ability to assign the capacity and throughput to the volumes in the capacity pool.

Azure NetApp Files provides two QoS types of capacity pools: auto (default) and manual.

Automatic (or auto) QoS type

  • When you create a capacity pool, the default QoS type is auto.
  • In an auto QoS capacity pool, throughput is assigned automatically to the volumes in the pool, proportional to the size quota assigned to the volumes.
  • The maximum throughput allocated to a volume depends on the service level of the capacity pool and the size quota of the volume, which are discussed in the other modules in this learning path.

Manual QoS type

  • When you create a capacity pool, you can specify the capacity pool to use the manual QoS type.
  • You can also change the existing capacity pool to use the manual QoS type.
  • Setting the capacity type to manual QoS is a permanent change. You can't convert a manual QoS type capacity pool to an auto QoS capacity pool. You can move volumes from a manual QoS capacity pool to an auto QoS capacity pool by dynamically changing the service level of a volume.
  • In a manual QoS capacity pool, you can assign the capacity and throughput for a volume independently.
  • The total throughput of all volumes created with a manual QoS capacity pool is limited by the total throughput of the pool. Throughput is determined by the combination of the pool size and the service-level throughput. For instance, a 4-TiB capacity pool with the Ultra service level has a total throughput capacity of 512 MiB/s (4 TiB x 128 MiB/s/TiB) available for the volumes.

Volumes

  • A volume is measured by logical capacity consumption and is scalable.
  • A volume's capacity consumption counts against its pool's provisioned capacity.
  • A volume’s throughput consumption counts against its pool’s available throughput. See Manual QoS type.
  • Each volume belongs to only one pool, but a pool can contain multiple volumes.
  • Volumes contain a capacity of between 50 GiB and 100 TiB. You can create a large volume with a size between 50 TiB and 2,048 TiB.

Large volumes

Large volumes begin at a capacity of 50 TiB and scale up to 2,048 TiB.