Have you been looking to expand your storage on Azure VMware Solution (AVS), but do not need the extra compute performance and the associated costs that come with adding more nodes? Are you looking for a more cost-efficient alternative storage solution that is easy to set up and manage? If so, you will be as excited as we are to learn about the general availability of Azure Elastic SAN for AVS – out today!

Using Azure Elastic SAN to expand your storage

Azure Elastic SAN is Azure’s latest addition to our family of block storage products, unique in part because of its support for remote block storage (iSCSI) and cost-efficient provisioning model for deployment at scale. Because Azure VMware Solution supports attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage option, you can create Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores with Azure Elastic SAN volumes and attach them to clusters of your choice. By using VMFS datastores backed by Azure Elastic SAN, you can expand your storage with an Azure deployed, fully-managed and VMware Certified storage area network instead of scaling the clusters.

With this integration, we add an important tool for optimizing workloads, whether they are large-scale databases requiring high storage capacity, or performance-intensive, mission-critical applications. Not every application requires the performance of directly attached storage, and many workloads, like backup and disaster recovery use cases or other capacity intensive workloads, can benefit from a more cost-efficient extensible storage solution. Azure Elastic SAN can be deployed and connected straight from the Azure portal, and at $0.06-0.08 per GiB per month (based on current pricing in East US), it is the cheapest per GiB storage option for AVS, while still offering scalable performance for a variety of use cases.

How to optimize price-performance with Azure Elastic SAN

When setting up an Elastic SAN, you create a pool of resources that is shared among the “volumes” within the SAN. Each of these volumes can be exposed as a datastore to your AVS SDDC. While Elastic SAN volumes share the performance you provision at the SAN level, the individual volumes have their own performance limits (shown in table below). By design, the individual volume limit is high so we can accommodate traffic bursts on any given volume. If you require more than 80,000 IOPS, you could spread your workloads across multiple volumes, placing them on different datastores.

Elastic SAN

Scale targets

Volume/Datastore

Elastic SAN

Size

64 TiB

1 PiB

IOPS

80,000

2,000,000

Throughput

1,280 MB/s

80,000 MB/s

Provisioning model

Per GiB provisioning granularity

Flexible model at TiB granularity

The pool of resources for your Elastic SAN is built up out of 1 TiB units: “Base units” and “Capacity-only units”. Base units provide both storage capacity and performance, while Capacity-only units provide just storage capacity. In practice, you start adding Base units until you reach the desired level of performance, then in case your storage capacity requirements are not yet met, you can add additional Capacity-only units. Both units offer local (LRS) or zonal (ZRS) redundant storage, and are priced as follows:

Pricing Meter

Unit

Monthly Price per GiB*

Premium LRS Base unit

1 TiB, 5000 IOPS, 200 MB/s

$ 0.08

Premium LRS Capacity only unit

1 TiB, capacity only (no provisioned performance)

$ 0.06

Premium ZRS Base unit  

1 TiB, 5000 IOPS, 200 MB/s 

$ 0.12 

Premium ZRS Capacity only unit 

1 TiB, capacity only (no provisioned performance) 

$ 0.09 

*Based on pricing in East US region as of 10/17/2024. Always refer to our pricing page for up-to-date details.

Get Started Today

By using Azure Elastic SAN for AVS, you get access to an Azure deployed, fully managed, VMware Certified storage area network (SAN) that can achieve massive scale, is easy to manage, and has redundancy built in at a low TCO. If you are looking for a native Azure Storage experience or you want to scale your storage capacity independently from your performance to get the lowest TCO and highest scale, get started with Azure Elastic SAN for AVS today! 

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