What to do if On-Premises storage space is running out?

This week one of our customers called me, and he said my On-Premise storage running out of  space! so he need to to create a new LUN/Disk for one of his critical servers.

So, In this post I will explain two options which Azure is providing in such case

So, the First thing that we will think about it is Azure storage. so how we can utlize it in a hybrid environment?

Microsoft offers several options to store data on the cloud. Each option has its unique purpose for serving different business needs. One of the significant capabilities that Microsoft Azure provides is the agility to use them in a hybrid environment if required.

There are various options available in the Azure Storage Account for storing user data.

• Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
• Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
• Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
• Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.
• Azure Disks: Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs.

Option #1
Azure file shares: Offers fully managed cloud file shares that you can access from anywhere via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
You can mount Azure file shares from cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS.
For file share storage we have two options and both are supported Serverless SMB and NFS file shares:

• File Share with Standard storage (HDD) when we deploy Standard storage with Storage-Kind: StorageV2 (general purpose v2)
• File Share with Premium Storage (SSD) when we deploy premium storage with Storage-Kind: FileStorage

Many on-premises applications use file shares. This feature makes it easier to migrate those applications that share data to Azure. If you mount the file share to the same drive letter that the on-premises application uses, the part of your application that accesses the file share should work with minimal, if any, changes.

Once you created the storage you can easily create new file shares and mount it on your machine as below screenshots

Note: You can use Powershell to mount the the disk, or use the below option
This script will check to see if this storage account is accessible via TCP port 445, which is the port SMB uses. If port 445 is available, your Azure file share will be persistently mounted

I have tested the speed of the file transfer and it was Average 3Mbps

Option #2
Azure Blob storage: is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

Blob storage is designed for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

You can mount a container in Blob storage from a Windows or Linux-based Azure Virtual Machine (VM) or a Windows or Linux system that runs on-premises by using the NFS 3.0 protocol. SMB is not supported for the blob storage.

To mount a Blob storage on you have multible options, such as:

• For Linux use blobfuse: blobfuse is a virtual file system driver for Azure Blob storage - Installation guide
  
• Fro windows use the Native method (NFS): See the guide

Perhaps, there are individual aspects to be considered before concluding the best option between Azure Blob Storage and Files. I would prefer Azure Files rather than Blob Storage

I will try my best to write more about Blobfuse and do a comparison between both of them :)