Whether or not you might be enhancing the resilience of mission-critical workloads or modernizing legacy programs; Azure Storage has an answer for you.
Microsoft is redefining what’s attainable within the public cloud and driving the subsequent wave of AI-powered transformation for organizations. Whether or not you’re pushing the boundaries with AI, enhancing the resilience of mission-critical workloads, or modernizing legacy programs with cloud-native options, Azure Storage has an answer for you.
At Microsoft Ignite 2025 and KubeCon North America final month, we showcased the most recent improvements in Azure Storage, powering your workloads. Here’s a recap of these releases and developments.
Innovating for the longer term with AI
Azure Blob Storage offers a unified storage basis for all the AI lifecycle, powering every thing from ingestion and preparation to checkpoint administration and mannequin deployment.
To allow prospects to quickly practice, fine-tune, and deploy AI fashions, we advanced the Azure Blob Storage structure to scale and ship exabytes of capability, 10s of Tbps throughput, and thousands and thousands of IOPS to GPUs. On this video, you possibly can see a single storage account scaling to over 50 Tbps on learn throughput. Azure Blob Storage can also be the muse that permits OpenAI to coach and serve fashions at unprecedented pace and scale.
For purchasers dealing with terabyte or petabyte scale AI coaching information, Azure Managed Lustre (AMLFS) is a high-performance parallel file system delivering huge throughput and parallel I/O to maintain GPUs repeatedly fed with information. AMLFS 20 (preview) helps 25 PiB namespaces and as much as 512 GBps throughput. Hierarchical Storage Administration (HSM) integration enhances AMLFS scalability by enabling seamless information motion between AMLFS and your exabyte-scale datasets in Azure Blob Storage. Auto-import (preview) permits you to pull solely required datasets into AMLFS, and auto-export sends educated fashions to long-term storage or inferencing.
Rakuten is accelerating the coaching of Japanese giant language fashions on Microsoft Azure, leveraging Azure Managed Lustre, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service to maximise GPU utilization and simplify scaling.
Natalie Mao, VP, AI & Information Division, Rakuten Group
As soon as fashions are educated and fine-tuned, inferencing takes heart stage delivering real-time predictions and insights. Azure Blob Storage offers best-in-class storage for Microsoft AI providers, together with Microsoft Foundry Agent Information (preview) and AI Search retrieval brokers (preview), enabling prospects to carry their very own storage accounts for full flexibility and management, making certain that enterprise information stays safe and prepared for retrieval-augmented era (RAG).
Moreover, Premium Blob Storage delivers constant low-latency and as much as 3X sooner retrieval efficiency, vital for RAG brokers. For purchasers that favor open-source AI frameworks, Azure Storage constructed LangChain Azure Blob Loader which delivers granular safety, memory-efficient loading of thousands and thousands of objects and as much as 5x sooner efficiency in comparison with prior group implementations.
Azure Storage is evolving to be an built-in, clever AI-driven platform simplifying administration of exabyte-scale AI information. Storage Discovery and Copilot work collectively that can assist you analyze and perceive how your information property is evolving over time utilizing dashboards and questions in pure language. With Storage Discovery and Storage Actions, you possibly can optimize prices, shield your information and govern giant datasets with a whole bunch of billions of objects used for coaching, and fine-tuning.
Optimizing trendy purposes with Cloud Native
Fashionable cloud-native purposes demand agility. Two ideas constantly stand out: elasticity and suppleness. Your storage ought to scale seamlessly with dynamic workloads—with out operational overhead. The improvements beneath are designed for the cloud, enabling you to auto-scale, optimize prices intelligently, and ship the efficiency wanted by trendy purposes.
Azure Elastic SAN offers cloud-native block storage for scale and tight Kubernetes integration for quick scaling, and multi‑tenancy that optimizes value. With new auto scaling assist, Elastic SAN mechanically expands assets as wanted, making it simpler to handle storage footprints throughout workloads. Early subsequent yr, we’ll lengthen Kubernetes integration by way of Azure Container Storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to normal availability (GA). These enhancements allow you to keep acquainted internet hosting environments whereas layering in cloud-native capabilities.
Cloud-native agility can also be vital for contemporary purposes constructed on object storage, with the necessity to optimize prices and efficiency for dynamic and unpredictable site visitors patterns. Sensible Tier (preview) on Azure Blob Storage repeatedly analyzes entry patterns, transferring information between tiers mechanically.
New information begins within the scorching tier. After 30 days of inactivity, it strikes to chill, and after 90 days, to chilly. If an object is accessed once more, it’s promoted again to scorching which retains information in essentially the most cost-effective tier mechanically. You may optimize prices with out sacrificing efficiency, simplifying information administration at scale and retaining your deal with constructing.
Internet hosting mission-critical workloads
Enterprises immediately run mission-critical workloads that require block storage and ship predictable efficiency and uncompromising enterprise continuity. Azure Extremely Disk is our highest-performance block storage providing, purpose-built for workloads like high-frequency buying and selling, ecommerce platforms, transactional databases, and digital well being report programs that demand distinctive pace, reliability, and scalability.
With Azure Extremely Disk, we are able to confidently scale our platform globally, figuring out that efficiency and resilience will meet enterprise expectations, that consistency permits our groups to deal with AI innovation and workflow automation slightly than infrastructure.
Charles McDaniels, Director of Programs Engineering Administration for World Cloud Companies, ServiceNow
We all know efficiency, value, and enterprise continuity stay the highest priorities for our prospects and we’re elevating the bar in each class:
- Efficiency: We now have additional improved the typical latency for Azure Extremely Disk by 30% with common latency nicely beneath 0.5ms for small IOs on digital machines (VMs) with Azure Increase. A single Azure Extremely Disk can ship business main efficiency of 400K IOPS and 10 GBps throughput. As well as, with Ebsv6 VMs, each Premium SSD v2 and Azure Extremely Disk can ship business main VM efficiency scale of 800K IOPS and 14 GBps throughput for essentially the most demanding purposes.
- Price: Versatile provisioning for Azure Extremely Disk reduces complete value of possession by as much as 50%, letting you scale capability, IOPS, and MBps independently at finer granularity.
- Enterprise continuity: Immediate Entry Snapshots (preview) helps you to backup and restore your workloads immediately with distinctive efficiency on rehydration. This differentiated expertise for Azure Premium v2 and Extremely Disk helps get rid of the operational overhead of monitoring snapshot readiness or pre‑warming assets, whereas lowering restoration, refresh, and scale‑out occasions from hours to seconds.
Azure NetApp Recordsdata (ANF) is designed to ship low latency, excessive efficiency, and information administration at scale. Its giant volumes capabilities have been considerably expanded offering an over 3x improve in single quantity capability scale to 7.2 PiB and a 4x improve in throughput to 50 GiBps. Cache volumes carry information and recordsdata nearer to the place customers want fast entry in an area environment friendly footprint. These make ANF appropriate for a number of high-performance computing workloads corresponding to Digital Design Automation (EDA), Seismic Interpretation and Visualization, Reservoir Simulations, and Danger Modeling. Microsoft is just not solely positioning ANF for mission vital purposes but additionally utilizing ANF for in-house silicon design.
Breaking limitations—migrating your storage infrastructure
Each group’s cloud journey is exclusive. Whether or not it is advisable transfer present environments to the cloud with minimal disruption or plan a full modernization, Azure Storage affords options for you. Storage Migration Answer Advisor in Copilot can present suggestions to assist streamline the decision-making course of for these migrations.
Azure Information Field and Storage Mover simplify the migration journey from on-premises and different clouds to Azure. The following era Azure Information Field is now GA. Storage Mover is our totally managed information migration service that’s safe, environment friendly and scalable with new capabilities: on-premises NFS shares to Azure Recordsdata NFS 4.1, on-premises SMB shares to Azure Blob storage, and cloud-to-cloud transfers. Storage Migration Answer Advisor in Copilot accelerates decision-making for migrations.
For customers able to migrate their NAS information estates, Azure Recordsdata now makes this simpler than ever. We now have launched a new administration mannequin making it simpler and extra value efficient to make use of file shares. Moreover, Azure Recordsdata now lets you get rid of complicated on-premises Energetic Listing or area controller infrastructure, with Entra-only identities for SMB shares. With cloud native identification assist, now you can handle your person permissions straight in Azure, together with exterior identities for purposes like Azure Digital Desktop (AVD).
Entra-only identities assist with Azure Recordsdata transforms SLB’s Petrel workflows by eradicating dependencies on on-premises area controllers, simplifying identification administration and storage infrastructure for globally distributed groups engaged on complicated exploration and reservoir characterization. This cloud-native structure permits prospects to entry SMB shares in a straightforward and safe method with out complicated VPN or hybrid infrastructure setups.
Swapnil Daga, Storage Architect for Tenant Infrastructure, SLB
ANF Migration Assistant simplifies transferring ONTAP workloads from on-premises or different clouds to Azure. Behind the scenes, the Migration Assistant makes use of NetApp’s SnapMirror replication know-how, offering environment friendly, full constancy, block-level incremental transfers. Now you can leverage giant datasets with out impacting manufacturing workloads.
For purchasers operating on-premises associate options who wish to migrate to Azure utilizing the identical partner-provided know-how, Azure has lately launched Azure Native affords with Pure Storage and Dell PowerScale.
To make migrations simpler, Azure Storage’s Migration Program connects you with a strong ecosystem of consultants and instruments. Trusted companions like Atempo, Cirata, Cirrus Information, and Komprise can speed up migration of SAN and NAS workloads. This program affords safe, low-risk transfers of recordsdata, objects, and block storage to assist enterprises unlock the total potential of Azure.
Begin your subsequent chapter with Azure Storage
The period of AI-powered transformation is right here. Start your journey by exploring Azure’s superior storage choices and migration instruments, designed to speed up AI adoption, cloud migration, and modernization. Take the subsequent step immediately and unlock new prospects with Azure Storage as the muse to your AI initiatives.
For any questions, attain out at azurestoragefeedback@microsoft.com.