Microsoft Cloud What IT architects need to know about

storage using Microsoft cloud services

Storage for and platforms

Enterprise Architects This topic is 1 of 5 in a series 1 2 3 4 5

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  Elasticity to scale up and down your storage demands
 No storage hardware to purchase  No storage hardware to maintain
 Built-in plumbing provided by Microsoft cloud services  Built-in plumbing to maintain and improve infrastructure (Microsoft)
 Available from anywhere in the world  Best storage security in the marketplace with ongoing improvements

Microsoft cloud storage options

Move-in ready Some assembly required Build from the ground up
See topic 2 for more information and resources See topic 3 for more information and resources See topic 4 for more information and resources

Use these prepackaged solutions that are Use these existing services as a starting point for Use these storage building blocks, along with
bundled with existing services. Use immediately your storage solution with additional coding, to create your own storage solution or
and with minimal configuration. configuration or coding for a custom fit. apps from scratch.

Microsoft Azure Storage

Intune Azure Content Azure Media (files)
Office 365 Delivery Network Services

Dynamics CRM Azure Storage

OneDrive for Online Azure Redis (blobs)
Business HDInsight Cache

Azure Storage
Visual Studio Azure Site Azure SQL SQL Server on (queues)
Online Recovery Database an Azure VM

Azure Storage
Yammer file Azure Azure (tables)
sharing Backup DocumentDB StorSimple

Ease of implementation Customization

Ease of implementation
vs. Customization High Move-in ready Built from the ground up

Medium Some assembly required Some assembly required

Low Built from the ground up Move-in ready

Key storage scenarios

Cache data Collaborate with team Manage data Manage source code
Accelerate access to commonly used members Store, move, or delete internal or Upload, collaborate, and run
data by storing it in a high-speed Grant permission to multiple users to external bulk data. application code files in the cloud.
cache. allow access to data in cloud storage.

Backup files Publish company Distribute millions of Manage videos

Store copies of internal or external communications events Store and serve video content to
data offsite in multiple cloud Create a single point of publication Create storage for telemetry ingestion customers or organization users.
locations. for internal or external messages. from websites, apps, and devices.

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 Microsoft Cloud What IT architects need to know about
storage using Microsoft cloud services
Storage for and platforms

Enterprise Architects This topic is 2 of 5 in a series 1 2 3 4 5

Move-in ready
Use prepackaged solutions Ready to go, bundled with Limited customization
immediately existing services

Product Features Common uses Key storage scenarios

 Files are secure, reliable, and accessible from multiple  Corporate or organization portal  Collaborate
devices and from anywhere  Team-based collaboration  Company communications
 Content is easily discoverable through search  Enterprise search  Manage videos
SharePoint  Workflows and retention policies make it easy to use
Online in Office and maintain content More Information
 Content can be accessed through web APIs or a
365 Cost Information
browser, or offline

 Mailboxes are secure, reliable, and accessible from  Enterprise email storage  Collaborate
multiple devices and from anywhere
Exchange  Mailbox content can be found through search
More Information
Online in Office
365 Cost Information

 Storage is secure, reliable, and accessible from  Individual users document store  Backup files
multiple devices and from anywhere  Ad hoc collaboration on
 Content is easily discoverable through search by the documents
OneDrive for user
Business  Content can be accessed through web APIs or a More Information
browser, or offline
Cost Information
 Each user gets 1 TB of storage

 Has built-in redundancy  Source code repository  Manage source code

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

 5 GB file size limit for each uploaded file  Enterprise social  Collaborate
 No limit on the number of files that can be uploaded  Share documents or links relevant to
 Best for quick sharing and discussion a conversation or topic
 Accessible through a browser More Information
Yammer file
Cost Information
sharing

 Subscription includes 5 GB of storage  Store and manage customer  Collaborate

Dynamics  For each increment of 20 Professional USLs, 2.5 GB of relationships
CRM Online storage capacity is added
 Storage is capped at 50 GB per customer More Information

 All software that you deploy is packaged and  Software deployment  Backup files
uploaded to Microsoft Intune cloud storage
Microsoft  Subscription includes 20 GB of storage with the
Intune option to purchase additional space, various software
and hardware inventory reports, policy management, More Information
mobile app publishing, alerts, monitoring, and
Cost Information
99.99% uptime SLA

 Simple, automated protection, replication, and  Virtual machines running in an  Backup files
recovery to Azure environment using Hyper-V can be
 Continuous health monitoring and orchestrated replicated between two datacenters or to
recovery Azure
 InMage Scout enables the protection of
Azure Site VMware and physical environments
Recovery
More Information
Cost Information

 Seamlessly protects data received from Windows  Protect data from a variety of on-  Backup files
Server and Windows Server Essentials premises (SharePoint, SQL,
 Includes System Center Data Protection Manager Exchange) and Azure (VMs)
 The data is stored in geo-replicated storage, which sources
maintains six copies of your data across two Azure
Azure datacenters
Backup  Supports delta changes, defined frequency,
compression, encryption, longer retention, and More Information
bandwidth throttling Cost Information

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 Microsoft Cloud What IT architects need to know about
storage using Microsoft cloud services
Storage for and platforms

Enterprise Architects This topic is 3 of 5 in a series 1 2 3 4 5

Some assembly required

Use existing services as a Requires some Can be customized to fit
starting point for your storage configuration or coding your needs
solution
Product Features Common uses Key storage scenarios

 Advanced and real time analytics  Distribute audio, video, applications,  Manage data
 Robust security against DDoS images, and other files faster and more  Manage videos
 Gets content automatically from an Azure Website or reliably to customers by using the servers
Azure Cloud Service once you set up the integration that are closest to them
Azure Content More Information
 New partnership with Akamai
Delivery Network
 Can handle sudden traffic spikes and heavy loads Cost Information

 Massively scalable hybrid cloud storage with larger  Data analytics workloads  Manage data
on-premises capacity for SSD and HDD  In-memory data processing framework for
 Access to enterprise data in Azure through the big data (Spark)
StorSimple Virtual Appliance  Real-time stream processing (Storm)
 Manage geographically-dispersed physical arrays  Large transactional processing (OLTP) of
HDInsight and virtual appliances, data protection policies, and non-relational data (HBase)
data mobility More Information
 Automatic deduplication and compression Cost Information

 Optimized to reduce management and costs  New cloud-designed applications with  Manage data
 Automatic high availability, disaster recovery, and relational data
upgrade  Data processing over schematic, highly
 Recommended for organizations managing hundreds structured data sets with relationships
Azure SQL
or thousands of databases of up to 1 TB in size  Spatial data or rich data types
Database
 Sharding techniques can split data across databases More Information
for increased storage See topic 5 for information about
Cost Information Elastic Database.
 Designed for modern mobile and web applications
 Fast reads and writes, schema flexibility, and the  User Profile store  Manage data
ability to scale up and down on demand  Customer database
 Best for flexible datasets that require query retrieval  Articles (for example, OneNote
and transactional processing Captures)
Azure
DocumentDB  Recommended for applications that are Internet More Information
scalable
Cost Information
 10GB/collection and 100+ collections per storage See topic 5 for a DocumentDB vs.
account Azure SQL Database comparison.

 Live and video on demand (VOD) delivery with scale  Encode, store, and stream audio and  Manage videos
 Highly available encoding and streaming video at scale
 Supports Flash, iOS, Android, HTML5, and Xbox  Real time streaming and VOD
Azure Media  Studio-certified DRM support  Streamlined video content
Services  Rich content monetization management
 Broad ecosystem of pre-integrated partners More Information
Cost Information

 Secure, dedicated Redis Cache, managed by Microsoft  Reverse lookup for Azure tables  Cache data
 Rich feature set and ecosystem provided by Redis  Frequently accessed content
 Recommended for all new developments on Azure  Synchronized content from other
Azure Redis needing a high-performance cache solution data stores
Cache  Available in sizes up to 53 GB, Premium adds
automatic sharding to 530GB and beyond
More Information
 Not as good for on-premises application cache
 Basic/Standard tier not intended for use as a persistent Cost Information
store

 SQL Server running as an installed application on an  Manage data for applications  Manage data
Azure virtual machine
 Use a gallery image with SQL Server installed or More Information
SQL Server on
bring your own SQL Server license
an Azure VM Cost Information

 Scalable, enterprise hybrid SAN storage with SSD  Manage data growth related to file shares,  Manage data
and HDD in the on-premises hybrid storage array, archives, and other data repositories  Collaborate
with cloud storage as an integrated extension of the  Offsite data protection and disaster
solution recovery for file shares, virtual machines,
StorSimple
 Inline deduplication, compression, automatic tiering, SQL, and SharePoint (using Remote Blob
and encryption unstructured and semi structured Storage)
data  Utilize cloud snapshots to clone data in
 Automated offsite data protection using cloud Azure and increase business agility
snapshots
 Highly-efficient, location-independent disaster More Information
recovery Cost Information
 Data mobility for enterprise data with StorSimple
Virtual Appliance in Azure

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 Microsoft Cloud What IT architects need to know about
storage using Microsoft cloud services
Storage for and platforms

Enterprise Architects This topic is 4 of 5 in a series 1 2 3 4 5

Build from the ground up

Create your own storage Requires programming Ultimate in customization
solution from scratch using the REST APIs and flexibility

Product Features Common uses Key storage scenarios

 Makes it easier to move legacy applications to the  Migrating legacy applications to the  Backup files
cloud cloud that rely on file shares
 Blob storage preferred for new applications  Share development and testing tools
 Can mount from an Azure virtual machine  Distributed apps can store logs,
Azure Storage  Can mount on-premises with SMB 3.0 diagnostic data, and crash dumps
(files)  Works with Linux and Windows
 Doesn t support Azure AD-based authentication or
ACLs (Azure Storage account keys provide More Information
authentication and authorized access to the file share) Cost Information

 Each storage account can hold up to 500 TB (one  Backups of files, computers, databases,  Manage data
subscription can have multiple storage accounts) and devices
 Storage accounts are organized into containers,  Images and text for web applications
which can have security applied to them and can  Configuration data for cloud applications
Azure Storage contain blobs  Big data, such as logs and other large
(blobs)  Block blobs are optimized for streaming and storing datasets
cloud objects, up to 200 GB in size
 Page blobs are optimized for representing IaaS disks  Azure uses blob storage for its own
and supporting random writes, up to 1 TB in size services, such as HDInsight and virtual
 Append blobs are optimized for append operations, machine disks.
up to 195 GB
 Premium Storage provides faster IOPS through SSD More Information
storage
Cost Information

 Storage account can contain any number of queues  Create a backlog of work to  Distribute events
 Queue can contain any number of messages (until process asynchronously
the storage account is full)  Processing log messages
 Queue messages are automatically deleted after  Decouple applications
Azure Storage
seven days if not retrieved and deleted by an
(queues)
application
 Messages may be up to 64 KB in size
 Secured at storage account level More Information
 Queues are intended to pass control messages, not
raw data Cost Information

 Best for semi-structured datasets  User data for web applications  Manage data
 Typically lower cost than traditional SQL  Address books
 Very fast if querying for key, slow if querying for value  Device information
 Massively scalable; any amount of tables up to the
Azure Storage
limits of the storage account
(tables)  Accessible through REST API, limited oData protocol,
.NET
 Values must be serialized More Information
See topic 5 for a Redis Cache vs. Azure table comparison. Cost Information

Microsoft Azure Storage recommendations

 Leverage multiple storage accounts for greater scalability, either for increased  When possible, batch operations into storage.
size (> 100 TB) or for more throughput (> 5,000 operations per second).  Aggressively cache information in the configuration database into a
 Design the ability for adding additional storage accounts as a configuration distributed cache.
change, not as a code change.  If application performance or reliability is dependent on having a certain
 Carefully select partitioning functions for table storage to enable the desired segment of data available in the cache, your application should refuse
scale in terms of insert and query performance. incoming requests until the cache has been prepopulated.
 Choose short column names for table properties as the metadata (property  Partition the data in either vertically (by table) or horizontally (segment
names) are stored in-band (the column names also count towards the table across multiple shards) to spread the load across multiple databases.
maximum row size of 1 MB).

Microsoft Azure Storage Azure Storage Documentation

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

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 Microsoft Cloud What IT architects need to know about
storage using Microsoft cloud services
Storage for and platforms

Enterprise Architects This topic is 5 of 5 in a series 1 2 3 4 5

Appendices
Elastic database
Use the virtually unlimited resources of Azure SQL Vertical scaling: You can change Azure database Horizontal scaling: You can add new databases
Database when: performance level/edition or by using elastic as needed.
database pools.
 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 Shard n
each tenant.
Shard 3
 Different sections of a database need to reside in Shard 2
different geographies for compliance, Lower edition Higher edition
Shard 1
performance, or geopolitical reasons.

More Information

DocumentDB vs. Azure SQL Database

Common attributes of DocumentDB and Uncommon attributes

Flexible Predictable
Azure SQL Database (no schema) (schema)
 Supports transactions
 Rich programming support 1 TB/
10 GB/Collection
Collection
 High availability
 Rich query support
 Granular permissions No Backups Backups

DocumentDB Azure SQL Database

Redis Cache vs. Azure table

Uncommon attributes of Single instance

Redis Cache and Azure Shards
(Active/Passive)
table
Sets, unions No sets, unions

Up to 53 GB TBs

Temporary Persistent

Redis Cache Azure table

Thanks to Oleg Kofman and Jon Epstein, both Senior Consultants for Microsoft, for their
Note original material on which this model is based.

Services and
More Microsoft Platform Options Security Identity Networking
cloud IT resources aka.ms/cloudarchoptions aka.ms/cloudarchsecurity aka.ms/cloudarchidentity aka.ms/cloudarchnetworking

April 2016 © 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. To send feedback about this documentation, please write to us at [email protected].