Azure Updates: Elastic SAN; FinOps; Key Vault

Microsoft General Manager Aung Oo explored the role of Azure Elastic SAN (storage area network), which entered general availability on February 13. The service is intended to simplify deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring SANs in the cloud. In particular, Microsoft has tried to provide resource hierarchies, dynamic provisioning, virtual desktop infrastructure.

Since the original preview announcement of Elastic SAN, Microsoft has added a range of new features. The list includes multi-session connectivity, together with increased performance and scale up to 80,000 IOPS, shared volume support, Server-Side Encryption with Customer Managed Keys, and snapshot support. Microsoft continues to raise performance thresholds for more demanding workloads.

“Not only does Elastic SAN use a familiar resource hierarchy to on-premises SANs; it also allows provisioning of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput at the Elastic SAN resource level, dynamically sharing the provisioned performance across your workloads, and managing security policies at the workload level as you would on SAN appliances. This makes migrating from on-premises SANs to the cloud a lot more straight-forward than trying to right-size hundreds or thousands of individual disks to serve the many workloads running on your SAN(s),” Oo wrote.