In partnership, NetApp & Microsoft released Azure NetApp Files back in 2017. This service is a Microsoft native, 1st-party file storage service in Azure that makes it easy to run file-based workloads in the cloud using the same protocols and tools customers rely upon on-premises. Based on NetApp’s industry-leading ONTAP technology with integrated data protection, data management, and data security features, the service quickly became the go to storage service for high performance mission critical workloads. Azure NetApp Files integrates seamlessly with other Azure services and enables the user to build comprehensive solutions leveraging the power of Azure's ecosystem. Recently, Azure NetApp Files has implemented a set of cost optimization features to help drive down the expense of using the fully managed file service, making it even more cost effective for most enterprise workloads.
Many customers find it challenging to run production workloads in the cloud cost-effectively, particularly when these workloads are performance-intensive and sensitive to latency. With Azure NetApp Files, the performance challenge has been solved and now cost optimization has been addressed. Azure NetApp Files delivers automatic storage cost savings by leveraging automated data tiering, space-efficient snapshots, performance optimized pricing and reserved capacity pricing based on committed usage. These features work together to significantly reduce the effective price of Azure NetApp Files.
Effective pricing reflects the actual cost customers pay for storage after applying built-in efficiencies and discounts. These savings directly reduce the $/GiB/month the customer pays, enabling customers to manage their storage expenses more effectively. With Azure NetApp Files, customers receive highly available, high-performance storage with industry leading data management features offered at three distinct performance price points that can each be further optimized making it operationally simple and cost effective to run your production workloads in Azure.
Data Tiering
The cool access data tiering feature lowers the cost of storage by automatically moving infrequently accessed data from the current service level (the hot tier) to an Azure storage account (the cool tier). Enabling cool access moves inactive data blocks from the volume and the volume's snapshots to the cool tier, resulting in cost savings up to 65%. With cool access, a customer defines a “coolness period,” the number of days before data can be moved, to provide a balance between performance and cost optimization. Additionally, the support for cool access in cross-region or cross-zone replication settings ensures that data protection is maintained without impacting the performance of source volumes, providing peace of mind and operational efficiency. For example:
Enterprise File Sharing: Cool Access
- Scenario: NFS and SMB file shares for enterprise applications
- Provisioned capacity: 500 TiB
- Service level: Standard priced at $0.147 GiB/month
- Cool access: 80% of the data is cool and tiered to low-cost storage at a monthly price of $0.059 GiB/mo. 5% of the data is accessed and moved back to standard pricing
- Effective Price: $.078 GiB/month providing a savings of 46.9%
Discounted Reserved Capacity Pricing
Azure NetApp Files reserved capacity provides customers an immediate, upfront discount by committing to storage capacity in stackable increments of 100TiB or 1PiB for one or three years. With Azure NetApp Files reserved capacity, customers can save between 18%-34% off the list price based on the service level and length of commitment. Reserved capacity improves financial predictability and stability, allowing for more effective budgeting. Additional usage is conveniently billed at the regular pay-as-you-go rate. With reserved capacity customers have the necessary storage resources available, supporting scalability and operational efficiency without unexpected cost fluctuations.
The effective price of Azure NetApp Files is the compounded effect of the advanced features and discounts stacked together. The more cost-savings features a customer utilizes, the greater the total savings. A lower upfront $/GiB allows customers to use Azure NetApp Files for most business-critical workloads without compromising performance and availability. Adding to our example:
Enterprise File Sharing: Cool Access + Reserved Capacity
- Scenario: Add a 1-year 100 TiB reserved capacity commitment to the previous example
- Provisioned capacity: 500 TiB
- Capacity tiered using cool access: 400 TiB (80%)
- Reserved capacity commitment discount: 18% for 100TiB on the standard service level
- Effective Price: $.073 GiB/month providing a savings of 50.5%
Space Efficient Snapshots
In addition to a lower effective price, with Azure NetApp Files customers can use snapshots to manage space-efficient copies of their data increasing the effective capacity of their storage. Effective Capacity represents how much data is accessible to the user beyond what is being physically stored.
Azure NetApp Files snapshots provide customers with space-efficient copies of their data, lowering overall storage requirements for data protection. Snapshots create full point-in-time copies of a dataset without duplicating the unchanged blocks. This space-efficient method offers customers cost-effective access to their data, providing instant recovery of individual files, folders, or entire volumes as well as maintaining secure rollback to protect against ransomware attacks. For example:
SQL Server: Snapshots
- Scenario: Space-efficient snapshots of the database for rollback and ransomware protection
- Service level: Premium at $0.294 GiB/month
- Snapshots managed: 1 daily snapshot with a 10% change rate
- Provisioned Capacity = 110 TiB (accounting for the 10% change rate)
- Effective Capacity: 190 TiB providing an 72.7% increase in accessible data
- Effective Price based on the effective capacity (1 snapshot) = $0.14 GiB/month
Storage pool and volume sizing with manual QoS
Efficient provisioning of capacity and performance will optimize the price of storage by maximizing utilization. Recent feature releases have made it much easier for customers to optimize the starting footprint, reducing upfront costs. The minimum storage pool size has been reduced from 4 TiB to 1 TiB and minimum volume size from 100 GiB to 50 GiB. This makes it easier to right size an environment upfront and be able to adjust both the pool and volume sizes as needed without sacrificing performance or functionality.
Built-in Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities can be used to optimize the pool size and cost further. With QoS controlled volumes, customers do not have to overprovision individual volume size to achieve a higher throughput. Using the manual QoS configuration, throughput can be assigned to each volume independently making it easy to maximize utilization of both capacity and performance within the pool. For example:
SAP HANA: Size and Performance Optimization w/QoS
A customer can use a 10 TiB capacity pool with QoS for an SAP HANA system. With the Ultra service level, the pool can support total throughput of 1280 MiB/s (128 MiB/s per 1 TiB of capacity). To maximize utilization, 4 volumes can be provisioned from the pool, each with their own size and performance requirements.
- SAP HANA data volume: Size 4 TiB with up to 704 MiB/s
- SAP HANA log volume: Size 0.5 TiB with up to 256 MiB/s
- SAP HANA shared volume: Size 1 TiB with up to 64 MiB/s
- SAP HANA backup volume: Size 4.5 TiB with up to 256 MiB/s
In this example the data volume gets the additional performance it needs without overprovisioning and the backup volume capacity needed without stranding performance. If at a later point the total performance is not needed, the volumes can be transitioned at any time from the Ultra service level priced at $0.393 per GiB/month to the Premium service level priced at $0.294 per GiB/month, saving 25%.
Conclusion
As businesses navigate the complexities of modern cloud infrastructure, they seek services that enable new capabilities at an affordable cost. An in-depth analysis of Azure NetApp Files’ built-in cost optimization features demonstrates that it is a cost-effective solution for most production workloads. The combination of effective capacity and pricing offers increased capacity at a lower cost, eliminating the difficult trade-off between advanced functionality and cost management. With Azure NetApp Files customers gain the storage performance and features necessary to confidently migrate business-critical applications to Azure at an affordable price.
For additional details on reserved capacity please the documentation and try the Azure NetApp Files performance and cool access calculators to easily understand the cost of performance optimized volumes and how much money can be saves by transparently tiering infrequently access data to less expensive storage tier.
