Microsoft Cloud

Storage for
Enterprise Architects

What IT architects need to know about

storage for Microsoft cloud services and
platforms
This topic is 1 of 5 in a series

Designing storage for the Microsoft cloud

Integrating your storage by using Microsoft cloud services gives you access to a broad range of services
and cloud platform options.

Why cloud storage?

Speed to market

Lower costs to maintain

Faster configuration for high availability and disaster recovery

No storage hardware to purchase
Built-in plumbing provided by Microsoft s cloud offerings
Available from anywhere in the world

Elasticity to scale up and down your storage demands

No storage hardware to maintain or migrate
Built-in plumber to maintain and improve infrastructure (Microsoft)
Best storage security in the marketplace with ongoing improvements

Microsoft cloud storage options

Move-in ready

Some assembly required

Build from the ground up

Use these prepackaged solutions that are

bundled with existing services. Use immediately
and with minimal configuration.

Use these existing services as a starting point for

your storage solution with additional
configuration or coding for a custom fit.

Use these storage building blocks, along with

coding, to create your own storage solution or
apps from scratch.

See topic 2 for more information and resources

Microsoft
Intune

Office 365

See topic 3 for more information and resources

Azure Content
Delivery Network

Azure Media
Services

HDInsight

Azure Redis
Cache

SQL Server on
an Azure VM

Dynamics 365

OneDrive for
Business

Visual Studio
Online

Azure Site
Recovery

Azure SQL
Database

Yammer file
sharing

Azure
Backup

Azure
DocumentDB

See topic 4 for more information and resources

StorSimple

Azure Storage
(files)

Azure Storage
(blobs)

Azure Storage
(queues)

Azure Storage
(tables)

Azure SQL Data

Warehouse

Key storage scenarios

Cache data
Accelerate access to commonly used
data by storing it in a high-speed
cache.

Backup files
Store copies of internal or external
data offsite in multiple cloud
locations.

September 2016

Collaborate with team

members

Manage data

Manage source code

Store, move, or delete internal or

external bulk data.

Upload, collaborate, and run

application code files in the cloud.

Publish company
communications

Distribute millions of
events

Manage/serve videos

Create a single point of publication

for internal or external messages.

Create storage for telemetry ingestion

from websites, apps, and devices.

Grant permission to multiple users to

allow access to data in cloud storage.

Store and serve video content to

customers or organization users.

2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].

Microsoft Cloud
Storage for
Enterprise Architects

What IT architects need to know about

storage for Microsoft cloud services and
platforms
This topic is 2 of 5 in a series

Move-in ready
Use prepackaged solutions
immediately
Product

Ready to go, bundled with

existing services

Features

Limited customization

Common uses

Key storage scenarios

Files are secure, reliable, and accessible from multiple

devices and from anywhere
Content is easily discoverable through search
Workflows and retention policies make it easy to use
and maintain content
Content can be accessed through web APIs or a
browser, or offline

Corporate or organization portal

Team-based collaboration
Enterprise search

Mailboxes are secure, reliable, and accessible from

multiple devices and from anywhere
Mailbox content can be found through search

Enterprise email storage

Storage is secure, reliable, and accessible from

multiple devices and from anywhere
Content is easily discoverable through search by the
user
Content can be accessed through web APIs or a
browser, or offline
Each user gets 1 TB of storage

Individual users document store

Ad hoc collaboration on
documents

Has built-in redundancy

Is based upon Team Foundation Server
Create backlogs, work in sprints, and track changes
and bugs
The best option for storing source code (it s best to
store documentation in SharePoint Online)

Source code repository

5 GB file size limit for each uploaded file for premium

networks
No limit on the number of files that can be uploaded
Best for quick sharing and discussion
Accessible through a browser

Enterprise social
Share documents or links relevant to
a conversation or topic

Collaborate

Dynamics
365

Subscription includes 5 GB of storage

For each increment of 20 Professional USLs, 2.5 GB of
storage capacity is added
Storage is capped at 50 GB per customer

Store and manage customer

relationships

Collaborate

Software deployment

Microsoft
Intune

All software that you deploy is packaged and

uploaded to Microsoft Intune cloud storage
Subscription includes 20 GB of storage with the
option to purchase additional space, various software
and hardware inventory reports, policy management,
mobile app publishing, alerts, monitoring, and
99.99% uptime SLA
Simple, automated protection, replication, and
recovery to Azure
Continuous health monitoring and orchestrated
recovery

Virtual machines running in an

environment using Hyper-V can be
replicated between two datacenters or to
Azure
InMage Scout enables the protection of
VMware and physical environments

SharePoint
Online in Office
365

Exchange
Online in Office
365

OneDrive for
Business

Visual Studio
Online

Yammer file
sharing

Azure Site
Recovery

Azure
Backup

September 2016

Collaborate
Company communications
Manage videos

More Information
Cost Information

Collaborate
More Information
Cost Information

Backup files

More Information
Cost Information

Manage source code

More Information
Cost Information

More Information
Cost Information

More Information

Backup files

More Information
Cost Information

Backup files

More Information
Cost Information

Seamlessly protects data received from Windows

Server and Windows Server Essentials
Includes System Center Data Protection Manager
The data is stored in geo-replicated storage, which
maintains six copies of your data across two Azure
datacenters
Supports delta changes, defined frequency,
compression, encryption, longer retention, and
bandwidth throttling

Protect data from a variety of onpremises (SharePoint, SQL,

Exchange) and Azure (VMs)
sources

Backup files

More Information
Cost Information

2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].

Microsoft Cloud
Storage for
Enterprise Architects

What IT architects need to know about

storage for Microsoft cloud services and
platforms
This topic is 3 of 5 in a series

Some assembly required

Use existing services as a
starting point for your storage
solution
Product

Azure Content
Delivery Network

HDInsight

Azure SQL
Database

Azure
DocumentDB

Azure Media
Services

Azure Redis
Cache

SQL Server on
an Azure VM

Requires some
configuration or coding

Features

Advanced and real time analytics

Robust security against DDoS
Gets content automatically from an Azure Website or
Azure Cloud Service once you set up the integration
New partnership with Akamai
Can handle sudden traffic spikes and heavy loads

Apache Hadoop distribution powered by the cloud

A Data Lake service
Scale to petabytes on demand
Process unstructured and semi-structured data
Develop in Java, .NET, and more
Skip buying and maintaining hardware
Connect on-premises Hadoop clusters with the cloud
Flexibility to deploy arbitrary Hadoop projects
through custom scripts (e.g. R, Giraph, Solr)

Optimized to reduce management and costs

Automatic high availability, disaster recovery, and
upgrade
Recommended for organizations managing hundreds
or thousands of databases of up to 1 TB in size
Sharding techniques can split data across databases
for increased storage
Stretch database with SQL Server 2016

Guaranteed low latency, 99.99% availability SLA with

limitless, elastic scale of storage and throughput
All data is globally replicated across any number of
regions with transparent failover and four welldefined consistency levels
Automatically indexes all your data without requiring
schemas or secondary indices
Rich SQL and JavaScript queries and multi-item
transactions

Live and video on demand (VOD) delivery with scale

Highly available encoding and streaming
Supports Flash, iOS, Android, HTML5, and Xbox
Studio-certified DRM support
Rich content monetization
Broad ecosystem of pre-integrated partners

Secure, dedicated Redis server with high-availability

with data replication and failover managed by MS
Recommended for any app needing high-throughput
Available in sizes up to 530 GB and beyond (with
Premium and automatic sharding)
Redis Persistence persists in-memory cached data to
Azure Storage
Redis Clustering allows you to achieve maximum scale
and throughput
Enhanced security and network isolation with Azure
Virtual Network support

SQL Server running as an installed application on an

Azure virtual machine
Use a gallery image with SQL Server installed or
bring your own SQL Server license

Continued on next page

Can be customized to fit

your needs

Common uses

Key storage scenarios

Distribute audio, video, applications,

images, and other files faster and more
reliably to customers by using the servers
that are closest to them

Manage data
Manage videos

Data analytics workloads

In-memory data processing framework for
big data (Spark)
Real-time stream processing (Storm)
Large transactional processing (OLTP) of
non-relational data (HBase)

Manage data

More Information
Cost Information

More Information
Cost Information

New cloud-designed applications with

relational data
Data processing over schematic, highly
structured data sets with relationships
Spatial data or rich data types
More Information

Cost Information

Manage data

See topic 5 for information about

Elastic Database and Stretch
Database.

Manage data

IoT, Mobile and Social

Gaming
Retail
Content management
More Information
Cost Information

Encode, store, and stream audio and

video at scale
Real time streaming and VOD
Streamlined video content
management

See topic 5 for a DocumentDB vs.

Azure Tables vs. Azure SQL
Database comparison.

Manage videos

More Information
Cost Information

Reverse lookup for data in any storage

service in Azure, such as DocumentDB
and Azure SQL Database
Synchronized content from other data
stores

Cache data
Message broker for highthroughput applications

More Information
Cost Information

Manage data for applications

More Information
Cost Information

Manage data

Product

StorSimple

Azure SQL Data

Warehouse

September 2016

Features

Common uses

Scalable, enterprise hybrid SAN storage with SSD

and HDD in the on-premises hybrid storage array,
with cloud storage as an integrated extension of the
solution
Inline deduplication, compression, automatic tiering,
and encryption unstructured and semi structured
data
Automated offsite data protection using cloud
snapshots
Highly-efficient, location-independent disaster
recovery
Data mobility for enterprise data with StorSimple
Virtual Appliance in Azure

Manage data growth related to file shares,

archives, and other data repositories
Offsite data protection and disaster
recovery for file shares, virtual machines,
SQL, and SharePoint (using Remote Blob
Storage)
Utilize cloud snapshots to clone data in
Azure and increase business agility

Elastic data warehouse that scales to petabytes

Up to 32 concurrent queries
Manage large volumes of structured data with fast
analytics
Dynamically grow and shrink compute in seconds
Supports Transparent Data Encryption
Backed up every 8 hours for 7 days

Sales reports
Usage reports
Lots of data

Key storage scenarios

Manage data
Collaborate

More Information
Cost Information

Manage data

More Information
Cost Information

2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].

Microsoft Cloud
Storage for
Enterprise Architects

What IT architects need to know about

storage for Microsoft cloud services and
platforms
This topic is 4 of 5 in a series

Build from the ground up

Create your own storage
solution from scratch

Requires programming
using the REST APIs

Ultimate in customization
and flexibility

Product

Features

Azure Storage
(files)

Makes it easier to move legacy applications to the

cloud
Blob storage preferred for new applications
Can mount from an Azure virtual machine
Can mount on-premises with SMB 3.0
Works with Linux and Windows
Doesn t support Azure AD-based authentication or
ACLs (Azure Storage account keys provide
authentication and authorized access to the file share)

Migrating legacy applications to the

cloud that rely on file shares
Share development and testing tools
Distributed apps can store logs,
diagnostic data, and crash dumps

Each storage account can hold up to 500 TB (one

subscription can have multiple storage accounts)
Storage accounts are organized into containers,
which can have security applied to them and can
contain blobs
Block blobs are optimized for streaming and storing
cloud objects, up to 200 GB in size
Page blobs are optimized for representing IaaS disks
and supporting random writes, up to 1 TB in size
Append blobs are optimized for append operations,
up to 195 GB
Premium Storage provides faster IOPS through SSD
storage

Backups of files, computers, databases,

and devices
Images and text for web applications
Configuration data for cloud applications
Big data, such as logs and other large
datasets

Storage account can contain any number of queues

Queue can contain any number of messages (until
the storage account is full)
Queue messages are automatically deleted after
seven days if not retrieved and deleted by an
application
Messages may be up to 64 KB in size
Secured at storage account level
Queues are intended to pass control messages, not
raw data

Create a backlog of work to

process asynchronously
Processing log messages
Decouple applications

Azure Storage
(blobs)

Azure Storage
(queues)

Azure Storage
(tables)

Best for semi-structured datasets

Typically lower cost than traditional SQL
Very fast if querying for key, slow if querying for value
Massively scalable; any amount of tables up to the
limits of the storage account
Accessible through REST API, limited oData protocol,
.NET
Values must be serialized

Common uses

Key storage scenarios

Backup files

More Information
Cost Information

Manage data

Azure uses blob storage for its own

services, such as HDInsight and virtual
machine disks.
More Information
Cost Information

Distribute events

More Information
Cost Information

User data for web applications

Address books
Device information

Manage data

More Information
Cost Information

Microsoft Azure Storage recommendations

Leverage multiple storage accounts for greater scalability, either for increased

size (> 100 TB) or for more throughput (> 5,000 operations per second).
Design the ability for adding additional storage accounts as a configuration
change, not as a code change.
Carefully select partitioning functions for table storage to enable the desired
scale in terms of insert and query performance.
Choose short column names for table properties as the metadata (property
names) are stored in-band (the column names also count towards the
maximum row size of 1 MB).

More
information

September 2016

When possible, batch operations into storage.

Aggressively cache information in the configuration database into a
distributed cache.

If application performance or reliability is dependent on having a certain

segment of data available in the cache, your application should refuse

incoming requests until the cache has been prepopulated.
Partition the data in either vertically (by table) or horizontally (segment
table across multiple shards) to spread the load across multiple databases.

Microsoft Azure Storage

Azure Storage Documentation

http://azure.microsoft.com/services/
storage/

http://azure.microsoft.com/
documentation/services/storage/

2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].

Microsoft Cloud
Storage for
Enterprise Architects

What IT architects need to know about

storage for Microsoft cloud services and
platforms
This topic is 5 of 5 in a series

Appendices
Elastic database
Use the virtually unlimited resources of Azure SQL
Database when:

Vertical scaling: You can change Azure database

performance level/edition or by using elastic
database pools.

Horizontal scaling: You can add new databases

as needed.

The total amount of data is too large to fit within

the constraints of a single database.

The transaction throughput of the overall

workload exceeds the capabilities of a single

database.
Tenants require physical isolation from each
other, so separate databases are needed for
each tenant.
Different sections of a database need to reside in
different geographies for compliance,
performance, or geopolitical reasons.

Shard n
Shard 3
Lower edition

Higher edition

Shard 2
Shard 1

More Information

DocumentDB vs. Azure Tables vs. Azure SQL Database

Common attributes of DocumentDB, Table
Storage, and Azure SQL Database

Uncommon
attributes

Azure Table Storage

Azure SQL Database

Multi-model (documents,
key-value, ...)

Key-value

Relational

SQL and JavaScript

queries

No support for SQL or

JavaScript queries

SQL queries

All data globally

distributed across any
number of regions

Single Region with DR

Single Region with DR,

User Initiated failover
support

Limitless storage and

throughput

Limitless storage

Max 1TB/database
*Premium

Azure DocumentDB

99.99 availability SLA

Fully managed database services
ISO 27001, HIPAA and EU Model Clauses
Compliant

Stretch Database with SQL Server 2016

On-premises
network

Stretch database is a feature of SQL Server 2016 that allows you to

transparently and securely move cold data, such as closed business data in a
large table that contains customer order information, to a SQL Stretch
database in Azure.

Azure PaaS
Eligible data

Local

Smart query
processing

SQL Server 2016

Azure SQL Stretch

Database

When stretched, the contents of a SQL Server instance, a database, or even a

single table is the combination of local data in SQL Server 2016 server and
remote data in Azure. Data that becomes eligible for stretch is automatically
moved to Azure by SQL Server 2016.
User queries that include the historical data are transparently forwarded to
Azure SQL Stretch database. The queries do not need to be re-written, even
though the table is stretched.

T-SQL queries

Stretch database provides a cost-effective option for long-term storage and

transparent access to historical data. It also solves performance and
availability problems that arise when tables become very large.
More Information
Thanks to Oleg Kofman and Jon Epstein, both Senior Consultants for Microsoft, for their
original material on which this model is based.

Note

More Microsoft
cloud IT resources
September 2016

Services and
Platform Options
aka.ms/cloudarchoptions

Security
aka.ms/cloudarchsecurity

Identity
aka.ms/cloudarchidentity

Networking
aka.ms/cloudarchnetworking

2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].