Azure Blob Storage, our object storage platform for storing large-scale data helps customers run their applications using a wide range of protocols. With multi-protocol support, customers can run their applications on a single storage platform with no application rewrites necessary, therefore eliminating data silos.
Today, we are announcing that Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol support for Azure Blob Storage is now generally available.
Hundreds of enterprise customers from various industries such as manufacturing, media, life science, financial services, and automotive have embraced this feature during our preview and are deploying their workloads in production. These customers have been using NFS 3.0 for a wide array of workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), analytics, and backup.
Migrate your existing applications using NFS protocol
With this feature, your Azure Blob Storage data can be mounted through NFS 3.0, and accessed through Blob REST API, and analyzed with the Azure Data Lake Service (ADLS) Gen2 API (Spark or Hadoop jobs, for example). Once data is ingested, you can run your existing business-critical NFS workloads such as financial risk simulation, analytics, media processing, and throughput-sensitive HPC jobs.
Samsung Electronics migrated their business innovation center platform which provides a holistic analysis of sales and marketing data across the globe to Azure.
“NFS 3.0 support on Azure Blob Storage linked our existing legacy system to the new modernized data lake so we can provide data insights from various sources. We no longer need to maintain different storage solutions and have eliminated data silos.”—KyungEun Lee, Principal Professional, Samsung Electronics
Run large-scale applications at object storage economics
Azure Blob Storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with object storage economics. One of the biggest suppliers in the automotive industry explains:
“To support the development of software in the domain of automated driving and driver assistance, we need to process and store a large amount of data from our development fleet. Azure Blob Storage with NFS 3.0 support helps us to shorten the feedback loop by running large scale simulations faster, more efficient and as a consequence at a lower cost.”
HPCC Systems tested their open-source THOR workload with this feature with hundreds of workers running Azure H series Virtual Machine (standard_h8) and reached 200Gb/s throughput on a single blob storage account.
“It is great to see NFS 3.0 being supercharged with cloud scale. Our THOR workload scales linearly to the object storage limits to generate insights for data from different data sources.”—Flavio Villanustre, VP of Technology and CISO, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group
The data stored in your storage account with NFS support is billed at the same rate as blob storage capacity charges with no minimal provision capacity required. The flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model gives you an extremely low total cost of ownership (TCO). Learn more about Azure Blob Storage pricing.
Take advantage of flexible data management capabilities
Workloads and applications such as HPC, machine learning, and big data analytics can now take advantage of Azure Blob Storage's large-scale throughput without any additional development required. Customers can choose any tier of Azure Blob Storage and with flexible lifecycle management capabilities, you can move data between tiers based on your needs. TomTom, the location technology specialist, adopted this feature for this reason.
“NFS support has helped us to provide the most accurate traffic insights to our customers seamlessly. NFS 3.0 for Azure Blob Storage provides us both with low latency premium tier and with low-cost cool tiers so that we can lift and shift all our traffic insight workloads to the cloud, and continue to support road authorities, local governments, and drivers with real-time and historical data to help reduce emissions and congestion.”—Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering, TomTom
Get Started
We are excited to help you modernize your NFS workloads with Azure Blob Storage. To get started, check out this video on introducing NFS 3.0 support for Azure Blob Storage and read more about the NFS 3.0 protocol support in Azure Blob Storage.