Forum Discussion
What are the pros & cons of Storage Migration Services?
Migration is 1-to -1. If you have 60 file servers to replace, SMS needs 60 file servers to migrate them to. They can be WS2016 or WS2012 R2, but if you use older operating systems:
- They will migrate much slower because they don't have the SMS proxy service included in WS2019
- You will have to migrate them again much sooner than if you chose WS2019, which has almost 10 years of support left. Your WS2012 R2 servers are already out of mainstream support, for instance, and they will cease to be supported at all in 2023
I'm not talking about Azure here, just SMS. If you are just wanting to send data to Azure that users don't directly access again via a file server, you should look Azure Databox options.
Ned Pyle | Principal Program Manager, MS | @nerdpyle
MicrosoftHi Avian 1,
We see a definite differentiation between the types of workloads a customer would put in SharePoint/SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business and the workloads a customer would put on a file server (with or without Azure File Sync) or directly into Azure Files.
SharePoint Online (SPO) is absolutely fantastic for Office Document collaboration scenarios - enabling co-editing, automatic file versioning, etc. Even though Ned and I work on file shares (Windows and Azure, respectively), we use SharePoint all the time for this kind of scenario.
File shares, wherever they're hosted, are typically useful for when, either for form or for function, a customer wants traditional file system semantics: file system locking, Windows-compatible ACLs, etc. Common scenarios we see: financial/legal documents, engineering file types (AutoCAD, source code, executable build shares, etc.), VM image libraries, multimedia creation (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.).
One other pattern we see customers doing is extending the life of their on-premises file servers with Azure File Sync (to avoid having to provision more on-premises storage), while they re-evaluate which shares can be migrated to SPO and which shares need to stay in file share form. SharePoint even has tooling that can read data from an Azure file share, so this is a smart strategy to migrate data to SPO :)
Hope this was helpful - I'm happy to answer any additional questions on the trade-offs here.
Will Gries
PM, Azure Files/Azure File Sync
