back to article Microsoft is cooking virtual storage in Azure

Microsoft is prepping something to do with virtual storage appliances spanning on-premises storage and Azure and will reveal all in April. This story starts with an early January postannouncing that SoftNAS can now offer its virtual NAS devices across on-premises storage and Azure. That post piqued The Register's interest, …

  1. AMBxx Silver badge

    How is this different so existing offerings such as Cloudberry Drive? Hopefully, the performance would be better than Cloudberry, but not sure what else is being offered beyond a Network share to Azure Storage.

    1. Ragarath

      Replication

      Replication, replication, replication.

  2. Miss Config
    Go

    Part Of Football Today

    It's all part of the Magic of The ( FA ) Cup.

    Over the weekend on TV showing games in the 4th Round, half-time ads showed a lot of

    'Microsoft Cloud'

  3. Cloud, what..... Sorry... Um... - you just made that up.

    Not sure you have the the correct link

    The sofNAS link doesnt seem to mention running devices across on-premise and Azure?

  4. PortlandBill

    Storage Spaces

    The answer you are looking for is Storage Spaces https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-direct-overview

    Why would MS drive museum exibits like Left Hand and Netapp when they can launch on prem Azure and Hybrid cloud Azure on their own IP. If HPE are involved in the launch in April it will be providing Spaces ready Nodes.

    Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

    Storage Spaces Direct is included in Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It is amazing that HPE still goes along with MSFT.... How they get HPE's help in making HPE irrelevant.

  6. JohnMartin

    Minor Corrections re ONTAP

    "Data ONTAP is a heavily customised BSD ...

    Data ONTAP uses BSD in more or less the same way ESXi uses Linux to boot, though nobody, (except maybe the Software Conservancy) would suggest that ESXi is a heavily customised Linux .. although unlike ESXi, some of the BSD pieces are leveraged by ONTAP, but things like network protocol stacks and CPU schedulers are currently managed by ONTAP directly .. the actual BSD bits which are part of Data ONTAP are pretty standard, and at one point the lack of support for BSD in Azure was something of an impediment to getting DataONTAP to run in there, however that time is well past.

    "And NetApp has ONTAP Edge, the virtual version of ONTAP."

    ONTAP Edge is an old name when the the virtual/software delivered versions of ONTAP were primarily engineered for edge deployments. A lot of work has been done since then, including multi-node HA and better performance, so that the Edge name has been retired. ONTAP now comes as ONTAP Cloud for the versions which can be purchased via the Azure and AWS cloud portals on an hourly basis, and ONTAP Select for the versions which can be purchased from any of the traditional NetApp sales channels and deployed on commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware configurations from a variety of hardware vendors.

  7. fredesmite

    big deal

    SoftNAS is a Linux cloud VM that offers file services - NFS and Samba to other VM's . It should run anywhere .

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