In today’s globally connected environment, even minutes of downtime can disrupt supply chains, hinder customer experiences, and affect regulatory commitments costing organizations thousands of dollars per minute and risking lasting reputational harm. Data resiliency is no longer optional—it is the foundation that keeps mission‑critical applications running, teams productive, and compliance intact. Organizations must ensure continuous data availability and zero data loss to meet stringent regulatory and audit standards.
Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is an Azure first party, enterprise-grade file storage offering in the cloud built to deliver unmatched performance, security with instant provisioning, and enterprise data management capabilities like snapshots, replication, backups, and flexible, cost-efficient service levels. It’s the trusted platform for critical workloads and the engine behind numerous migrations that drive Azure enterprise cloud journeys.
As businesses scale, the impact of service disruptions grows, and storage platforms must evolve to help maintain operational continuity. To support these needs, we are introducing Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone‑redundant storage (ANF Elastic ZRS)—a new service that provides enhanced resiliency across availability zones (AZs) and advanced data management capabilities. Built on Azure infrastructure, ANF Elastic ZRS can be deployed rapidly, accelerating availability across a broad set of regions. As a customer, you benefit from a service that can quickly adapt, whether that means expanding to a new Azure region you require, or adopting new technological advancements faster.
Synchronous replication and service managed failover
Built on Microsoft Azure’s zone-redundant storage (ZRS) architecture, ANF Elastic ZRS synchronously replicates data across multiple AZs within a region.
The graphic below shows the high-level architecture of ANF Elastic ZRS.
The following summarizes the operational methodology used:
- Synchronous replication: ANF Elastic zone-redundant storage (ZRS) volume replicates data within your NetApp Elastic Account to three or more AZs within the primary region of choice.
- Service managed failover: If one AZ goes down (think single datacenter failure, power outage), ANF Elastic ZRS automatically routes traffic to the failover zone that was chosen during initial setup without customer intervention. The mount target and service endpoint remain the same, so your applications barely notice.
- Zero data loss and high availability for mission-critical applications: ANF Elastic ZRS ensures uninterrupted operations for mission-critical applications and regulated systems by combining synchronous replication with service-managed failover. This architecture guarantees zero data loss and seamless continuity even during zone-level failures, meeting enterprise resiliency standards.
Capabilities for enterprise mission-critical applications
- NFS, SMB protocol support, multi-AZ file service: ANF Elastic ZRS supports NFS and SMB independently with the added benefit of zonal redundancy.
- Rich enterprise data management capabilities: Instant writeable space-efficient snapshots, clones, tiering, and backup integration all powered by the NetApp ONTAP® Unified data management platform.
- Metadata performance: Beyond consistent throughput, ANF Elastic ZRS provides efficient handling of metadata operations such as rapid file creation and fast enumeration of numerous small files, improving responsiveness of metadata-heavy workloads. Its shared QoS architecture dynamically allocates IOPS across volumes to maintain low-latency, metadata-intensive operations consistently.
- Cost optimized: ANF Elastic ZRS delivers multi-AZ high availability in a single volume at a lower cost than cross-zone replication with three separate ANF volumes, making it an efficient and valuable investment. You can create volumes as small as 1 GiB, giving you the flexibility to optimize storage for workloads of any size.
Apart from the above capabilities that are already supported, we will be adding the below capabilities in the future:
- Simultaneous multi-protocol, multi-AZ file service: The service will support simultaneous NFS, SMB, and Object REST API access to the same dataset. This flexibility is crucial for environments where Windows and Linux workloads share data, such as analytics platforms and enterprise file shares.
- Custom region pair for cross-region replication: ANF Elastic ZRS will be offering the flexibility to choose custom region pairs for cross-region replication, meeting strict compliance and disaster recovery requirements for large enterprise customers. This capability ensures business continuity while aligning with unique geographic or regulatory needs.
- Migration Assistant: This capability will simplify data movement from on-premises or other ONTAP® systems to Elastic ZRS service level for seamless cloud adoption.
Targeted use cases
Use case | How ANF Elastic ZRS helps |
|
General file shares |
Corporate user data including home directories or departmental file shares, remain accessible even during zone outages, ensuring seamless employee productivity and business continuity. |
|
Financial services and trading platforms |
Delivers zero data loss and nonstop trading even in a zone outage, so financial apps stay compliant, and customers stay confident. |
|
Kubernetes/containerized applications |
Keeps Kubernetes and container workloads running even during zone outages by instantly synchronizing data across zones and enabling rapid, automated failover. Your stateful apps stay online with zero data loss and minimal downtime. |
|
Applications |
Ensure nonstop access to in-house/line of business apps, even if an AZ fails, as data stays online with zero outages or lost transactions. |
Innovation in action
A global healthcare enterprise running mission-critical application, on-premises is looking to modernize its infrastructure by moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud. The organization’s top priorities are eliminating downtime during maintenance and ensuring seamless failover to maintain application availability.
By adopting ANF Elastic ZRS, the organization gained a fully managed, zone-resilient storage solution that synchronously replicates data across three Azure AZs. This ensures zero data loss and near-instant failover, even during zone outages or platform maintenance. The mission-critical application remains highly available without requiring operational intervention, dramatically improving uptime, and simplifying infrastructure management.
ANF Elastic ZRS delivers the same enterprise-grade features as existing Azure NetApp Files service levels—such as NFS/SMB support, snapshots, encryption, and backup—all while removing the complexity of managing high availability (HA) clusters or VM-level failover. For the healthcare provider, this translates into higher SLA compliance, reduced operational overhead, and a more resilient foundation for its mission-critical application landscape.
Take the next step toward resilient storage
NetApp on premises customers: this is the inflection point you’ve been waiting for to move to Azure. ANF Elastic ZRS‑ brings the ONTAP®-powered data management you trust to a fully managed, multi-AZ file service, so you can modernize mission‑AZ file service, so you can modernize mission‑critical workloads with enterprise resilience, meet availability commitments, and reduce operational overhead—without re‑architecting your applications.
ANF Elastic ZRS is available now in these Azure regions and we will be rapidly expanding region availability.
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