Understanding Data Resiliency: Your Key to Continuity

Data resiliency is now essential. It ensures that critical applications remain operational, keeps teams productive, and meets compliance requirements. Companies must guarantee continuous data access and eliminate any possibility of data loss to satisfy strict regulatory and auditing protocols.

In our interconnected world, even a brief downtime can disrupt supply chains, compromise customer experiences, and impact regulatory obligations, leading to significant financial losses. Data resiliency has become a necessity, acting as the backbone that supports mission-critical applications while maintaining team productivity and compliance.

Introducing Azure NetApp Files: A Reliable Cloud Storage Solution

Featuring Azure’s first-party enterprise-grade file storage, Azure NetApp Files (ANF) delivers superb performance and security. It offers instant provisioning and robust data management capabilities, including snapshots, replication, and backup options that are both flexible and cost-effective. It’s the go-to platform for essential workloads, facilitating numerous migrations that enhance Azure’s enterprise cloud journey.

Enhancing Operational Continuity with ANF Elastic Zone-Redundant Storage

As businesses grow, the impact of service disruptions becomes more significant. Hence, storage solutions must evolve to ensure continuous operations. We’re excited to announce Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage (ANF Elastic ZRS). This service enhances resiliency across multiple availability zones (AZs) and includes advanced data management features. Built on Azure’s infrastructure, ANF Elastic ZRS can be deployed quickly, helping you adapt promptly to new requirements or technology advancements.

Synchronous Replication and Managed Failover

ANF Elastic ZRS is built on Microsoft’s zone-redundant storage architecture, enabling synchronous data replication across different AZs within a single region. Below is a summarised overview of its operational methodology:

• Synchronous replication: The ANF Elastic ZRS volume replicates data within your NetApp Elastic Account to at least three AZs in your chosen region.
• Service-managed failover: If one AZ goes offline due to issues like a data centre failure or power outage, ANF Elastic ZRS automatically redirects traffic to a pre-selected failover zone without any action required from you. The service endpoint remains unchanged, ensuring minimal disruption to your applications.

This means you can enjoy zero data loss and high availability for critical applications. ANF Elastic ZRS effectively combines synchronous replication and managed failover, ensuring uninterrupted operations even during zone failures.

Benefits for Mission-Critical Applications

• Protocol Support: ANF Elastic ZRS supports both NFS and SMB protocols, offering zonal redundancy for each.
• Advanced Data Management: Enjoy efficient space-saving snapshots, clones, and tiering, all backed by the NetApp ONTAP® Unified Data Management platform.
• Improved Metadata Performance: ANF Elastic ZRS excels at handling metadata operations, which boosts responsiveness for metadata-heavy workloads. Its shared QoS architecture dynamically allocates IOPS to ensure low-latency operations.
• Cost Efficiency: ANF Elastic ZRS provides multi-AZ high availability at a lower cost compared to using three separate ANF volumes for cross-zone replication.

Future Enhancements

Looking ahead, we are excited to introduce additional capabilities:

• Simultaneous Multi-Protocol Service: Support for NFS, SMB, and Object REST API access to the same dataset will allow better flexibility across various workloads.
• Custom Region Pair for Cross-Region Replication: Choose specific region pairs for cross-region replication, ensuring compliance with strict regulatory needs.
• Migration Assistant: This tool will streamline moving data from on-premises or other ONTAP® systems to the Elastic ZRS service, making the cloud transition seamless.

Use Cases for ANF Elastic ZRS

Transform Your Storage Approach

Consider a global healthcare company that wanted to modernise its infrastructure by migrating critical applications to the cloud. It was crucial for them to avoid downtime during maintenance and ensure smooth failover for application availability.

By deploying ANF Elastic ZRS, they achieved a fully managed, resilient storage solution that synchronously replicates data across three Azure AZs. This setup guarantees zero data loss and nearly instant failovers even during platform maintenance or outages. As a result, their mission-critical applications remained highly available without needing any manual adjustments, boosting uptime and simplifying management.

ANF Elastic ZRS retains the same enterprise features as other Azure NetApp Files options, like snapshots and encryption, while eliminating the complexity associated with high-availability clusters or VM failovers. For the healthcare sector, this shift resulted in higher SLA compliance and reduced operational workloads.

Take the Next Step Towards Resilient Storage

If you’re using NetApp on-premises, now is the perfect time to transition to Azure. ANF Elastic ZRS introduces ONTAP® powered data management in a fully managed, multi-AZ file service, allowing you to modernise critical workloads and meet availability commitments seamlessly. This approach reduces operational overhead without needing to re-architect your applications.

ANF Elastic ZRS is currently available in selected Azure regions, with plans for rapid expansion.

Explore ANF Elastic ZRS in Azure today and join the ranks of enterprises seeking top-notch performance, availability, and simplicity.