As your Microsoft Azure infrastructure grows, managing your storage and your virtual machine disks becomes more complicated. Storage accounts have capacity limits and limits on IOPS. To get around these limits requires creating multiple storage accounts and ensuring each account can provide the IOPS required by its disks. These limitations and this workaround make it difficult to scale storage as your needs grow. Fortunately, Azure offers tools to help you get your disks and storage under control.

Azure Managed Disks

Using Azure Managed Disks automates the storage management associated with your Azure Virtual Machines. For applications with high throughput requirements, choose Premium managed disks, which use high-performance SSD drives. Non-critical applications can user Standard managed disks, built on traditional hard disk drives. Once you’ve specified the kind of disk required, Azure handles the storage management for you.

Easy to Scale

Using Managed Disks, you don’t need to create storage accounts for the disks used by your Azure VMs. You don’t have to worry about creating more storage accounts to stay within the IOPS limit for your disks.

Custom images can be centrally managed to create multiple VMs. Creating images of an Azure Managed Disk is easily done through the Azure portal and includes the data disks as well as the managed OS disk.

These features mean you can scale much more easily and rapidly than before, creating thousands of new disks within minutes. This means large clusters supporting Big Data analytics—or processing peak application demand—can be spun up as needed.

Easy to Protect

Managed disks can be secured using Azure Rule-Based Access Control, allowing granular protection. Ensure high availability by automatically replicating data to two additional copies. Data can be further protected using Azure Disk Encryption; you can even manage the keys yourself.

You’ll also improve the reliability of your Availability Sets, because managed disks ensure the VMs’ disks are isolated and don’t have a single point of failure. Another boost to your availability comes if you use Azure Backup service to keep VM backups in a different region.

Other Azure Disks

Of course, not all your Azure storage will be a VM disk, so you’ll use other Azure features to make managing them easier, even as your storage grows.

Use Azure Storage Explorer to manage all your storage resources, including Blob, Queue, Table, File, Cosmos DB, and Data Lake storage. Azure Storage Explorer lets you create, delete, and edit these resources. Azure Storage Explorer is a standalone application that runs locally on your Windows, Linux, or MacOS device to connect to your storage accounts.

Make the most of your Microsoft Azure resources by managing them wisely. As a Microsoft Partner, Prescient Solutions offers expert Azure services to Chicago and Schaumburg area enterprises. Our team of consultants will help you design and implement your Azure infrastructure, as well as provide managed services to optimize its value to your organization. Contact us to learn how working with Prescient Solutions can help you make the most of your Microsoft Azure cloud.