Want it? Got It. Azure NetApp Files Now with SMB Support

Get the same great Linux NFS Azure NetApp Files experience, now with Windows file services support. Sign up to be one of the first customers to test-drive your high-performance SMB workloads.

If you’re one of the 30% of the file services world who have been waiting for Azure NetApp Files to bring high performance and advanced data management capabilities to SMB support, the wait is over.

We are excited to announce that workloads that rely on the SMB protocol for file access and sharing are now supported in the native Azure NetApp Files service in the cloud.

Be One of The First

“The biggest surprise for us was the performance and ease of use – we were up and running in under an hour, with 40 TB of high availability storage.” Financial Services leader.

Azure NetApp Files – a native Azure service - has been in preview with one-hundred clients already onboarded in the past few months. Now that we have added SMB, we want to bring you and your Windows file-based applications and file-share requirements onboard.

Workloads we are seeing include:

• High-performance database applications
• Linux NFS workloads
• SAP Hana deployments
• Application development
• EDA applications
• Analytics
• And more…

Who Is Using Azure NetApp Files Today?

The mix of these use cases is crossing every vertical market including financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, government, and high-tech. For example, we have a distributor who tells us they can exceed the SLAs for their their internal IT customers, spinning up environments in minutes for low-latency, high-performance workloads, through to a fin-serve client who is running at sub-second response times in the Azure cloud for his mission-critical business application.

Fulfill Your Cloud-First Mandate – Meet Your Azure Monetary Commit

“I now have a very fast and reliable capability to create NFS file shares for any workload my (internal) customer demands. The speed and reliability are as good if not better than with my on-premises solutions – but it’s Azure, so I can scale up on demand. My customers are getting a consistent service model and fast turnaround for almost any business need.” Fortune 500 distributor.

The Gold Standard in the Azure Cloud

Azure NetApp Files is built (in my opinion) on the gold standard for storage and data management – our industry-leading NetApp ONTAP® software. But it is delivered as an Azure service, natively within Azure data centers.

What this means is your application performance will be as good as a bare metal, on-premises platform - just available as a cloud service to use as you see fit, and delivering the equivalent of a multi-million-dollar infrastructure environment, with simply a few clicks. You can access large amounts of I/O with sub-millisecond latency or a large amount of bandwidth for scale-up or scale-out environments.

“We were accepted into the preview program and thought that it would be cool to try Azure NetApp Files for one of our NFS workloads using about 4TB of data. But now we’re at 5 workloads using 40TB and expect to be well over 50 workloads and 100+TB of data before year-end. My team is saving hundreds of hours, the performance is spectacular, and the simplicity of mounting volumes through the Azure portal means anybody can use the service without needing the skills of a storage architect.” Global retailer.

Yes, you are right. I am not naming who those customers are (it’s a legal thing) but I can tell you that pretty much all of them are brand names that you probably deal with every day. I can also share that in our customer survey we asked the question, “What surprised you the most about Azure NetApp Files?” The answer was the same from everyone – “How easy and fast it is to use, and how amazing the performance is.”

Want Your Own Azure NetApp Files?

See for yourself what everyone is talking about; watch me demo it here.

If you have a need to support SMB protocol workloads in the Azure cloud AND want to be one of the first customers to get access, sign-up today. You will get a call-back from one of our Azure NetApp Files specialists to determine if now is the right time for you, and to talk about how to onboard.

It’s that easy.

We’re excited about Azure NetApp Files and we know you will be too. Azure NetApp Files – it’s about as good as cloud gets.

If you have any comments or questions, reach out to me personally. jeff.whitaker@netapp.com