Microsoft recently announced NFS 4.1 support for Azure Files is now in preview. This adds exciting new opportunities for customers leveraging Azure files to get an easy to use NAS storage at a cloud-scale level. This offering now provides users with a “fully managed NFS file system as a service.” Customers can now access Azure’s distributed cloud file system as application storage, data repositories, persistent storage for container-based systems, or even is a dump and staging location for databases.
Veritas has worked with the Microsoft Azure files team to ensure day-one support for Azure files NFS, even in preview mode. Just like Azure Files Server Message Block (SMB) shares, Veritas NetBackup users can easily configure protection for data on Azure Files with NFS. NetBackup can back up data directly off the share and store optimized copies in lower-cost storage tiers. This allows customers to not only protect themselves against incidents that impact their working data, but they can migrate infrequently accessed data from the file share to deduplicated object storage.
Finally, the backup data is portable and recoverable anywhere. Recover to an alternate share for some testing. Or replicate the copy to another region or location for resiliency. You can even restore backups from other sources to the Azure file share to help with data migration.
For more details, check out this video demonstrating how to protect Azure files with NFS 4.1 support.
