17 January 2023, Johannesburg and Cape Town – Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure NetApp Files in its South African cloud region. This native Azure service enables businesses to deploy and run file-based applications in the cloud without having to refactor or rearchitect them.
Azure NetApp Files builds on the partnership between Microsoft and NetApp that spans more than two decades by combining the benefits of Azure with proven and trusted NetApp ONTAP storage operating system to simplify migration of previously un-migratable mission-critical workloads (for both Linux and Windows applications).
South African organisations can now easily migrate SAP HANA, high-performance computing (HPC), VMware, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and complex databases such as Oracle and SQL Server. These workloads can be rapidly migrated without compromising on their performance, while delivering the reliability and scalability provided by Azure cloud.
“By combining the respective strengths of the two organisations, Azure NetApp Files delivers on enterprise requirements for hybrid infrastructure. With Azure NetApp Files available to South African businesses means they have access directly from their Microsoft Azure portal.
This has become the fastest-growing Azure service due to the ease in which it migrates and runs the most demanding file workloads using a native, high-performance file storage service,” says Johannes Kanis, Director for Azure Core at Microsoft.
“Spanning more than two decades, the Microsoft and NetApp partnership has put us in an enviable position. During that time, we have developed a strong partnership that’s built on mutual trust, respect, and success. We share a vision for partnering with the best to deliver the best in customer experience. That is exactly why we put our heads together to co-engineer Azure NetApp Files” says Jordi Botifoll, NetApp´s Vice President for EEMI region.
The partnership between Microsoft and NetApp drives innovation in the customer experience by providing businesses with an intuitive way to benefit from the scale, agility, and economics of the public cloud in their file-based workloads. Current solutions in the market provide limited enterprise-grade capabilities and lack file protocol and version support, advanced data management, security, and a consistent user experience.
Azure NetApp Files overcome the challenges when migrating file-based workloads to the cloud. It features integrated data protection while delivering support for multiple protocol versions including NFSv3, NFSv4.1, and SMB3.1.x, and performance tiers (Standard, Premium, and Ultra) to expand the addressable application footprint of organisations across industry verticals.
Azure NetApp Files is a bare-metal, high performance, low latency enterprise file storage service and has been enabling businesses to migrate and run the most demanding workloads in the cloud. It is built for simplicity, performance, and compliance. With Azure NetApp Files in place, technology leaders gain a better understanding of their infrastructure while achieving high performance and reliability requirements.
With Azure’s push towards the use of availability zones (AZs) the need for storage-based data replication is equally increasing. Azure NetApp Files now support cross-zone replication. With this new in-region replication capability you can replicate your Azure NetApp Files volumes asynchronously from one Azure availability zone to another in a fast and cost-effective way.
