Discover and assess on-premises Network Attached Storage (NAS) shares using Azure Migrate
Network-attached storage (NAS) holds much of an enterprise’s data; home directories, project shares, media libraries, application data, and analytics datasets, often spanning tens or hundreds of terabytes across protocols and administrative boundaries. Moving this estate to Azure starts not with copying data, but with understanding what you have, where each share should go, and what it will cost. Building on the file share assessment capability we announced in May, today we’re announcing the public preview of NAS share discovery and assessment in Azure Migrate. It connects directly to Dell PowerScale/Isilon and NetApp ONTAP clusters, inventories every SMB, NFS, and S3 share, and assesses each against Azure Files, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure NetApp Files—providing readiness, right-sized configurations, cost estimates, and migration tooling guidance. Your NAS assets now join servers, applications, and databases in the same Azure Migrate project, inventory, and business case. Why does this matter NAS planning has historically been done with spreadsheets, vendor-specific tools, and a lot of manual reconciliation. Storage ends up being assessed separately from the servers and applications that depend on it, which makes it hard to sequence a migration or defend a budget. This capability is designed to help you: Replace manual inventory with automated discoveries across Dell and NetApp platforms, so you can go from "we think we have a few thousand shares" to a verified, per-share inventory. Effectively plan your NAS shares alongside everything else. NAS clusters and their shares appear in the same Azure Migrate inventory as your VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers, databases, and web apps. Make your informed decision before you migrate. Each share gets a readiness verdict, a recommended Azure service and SKU, and a monthly cost estimate. What's available in public preview Add Dell or NetApp NAS clusters: Discover Dell PowerScale / Isilon (OneFS) and NetApp ONTAP AFF / FAS clusters, and inventory every SMB, NFS, and S3 shares they host — including shares exposed through more than one protocol. Explore and review on-prem shares and workloads: Review cluster and share details in the portal: model, nodes, total and used capacity, protocol versions, volume, and estimated size. Group and filter shares by tag — by business unit, cost center, or application — so related workloads can be planned together. Suitable Azure storage targets: Assess each share against Azure Files, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure NetApp Files, with control over target region, sizing criteria, comfort factor, redundancy, media type, access frequency, and workload type. Alternative migration paths: Compare various migration paths side by side — a recommended mixed path that sends each share to its best-fit service, alongside single-service alternatives — with readiness, monthly cost, and estimated emissions for each. Business case: Build a business case for a NAS-only estate or for a mixed estate of VMs and NAS, comparing a modernization approach against lift-and-shift. End-to-end experience The experience follows the same guided workflow you already know from Azure Migrate. 1. Enable the feature Install the latest Azure Migrate appliance or turn on auto-update, so your existing appliance picks up the new capability. Unlike file shares hosted on Windows and Linux servers, NAS clusters need to be added explicitly: in the appliance configuration manager, add a credential of source type NAS Server, then add a discovery source of type NAS Server with your cluster's FQDN and port. The account needs read-only permission at cluster level — Azure Migrate only reads metadata and never writes to your storage. 2. Discover your NAS estate Create an Azure Migrate project, deploy the appliance on VMware, Hyper-V, or a physical server, and point it at your clusters. The appliance connects to each cluster's management endpoint and collects system and share metadata, vendor, product and model, operating system version, cluster nodes, total and used capacity, share and bucket paths, protocols and protocol versions; followed by performance signals such as IOPS and throughput. Discovered clusters and their shares appear as first-class inventory objects, listed alongside the Windows and Linux file servers the appliance already finds. Filter by type, search, tag, and export the inventory at whatever scale your estate demands. Discovery runs a daily cycle and updates existing items as new metadata arrives, so the picture improves over time rather than being a one-shot snapshot. 3. Create an assessment Select the shares you care about — individually, by tag, or a whole cluster at a time — and create an assessment. The share is the unit of assessment, so every SMB, NFS, or S3 share receives its own verdict rather than inheriting one from its host. Assessment settings let you shape the recommendation to your environment: choose the target Azure region, pick as-is or performance-based sizing, set a comfort factor for headroom, and configure redundancy, Azure Files media preferences, and Azure Blob access frequency. A workload type setting from general purpose file shares through to AI/ML and mission-critical, helps Azure Migrate recommend an appropriate performance level. Azure NetApp Files is added to the evaluation automatically when the source share is detected on NetApp NAS. Settings can be changed, and the assessment recalculated at any time. 4. Review results and build the business case Results are organized as migration paths. The recommended path routes each share to its best-fit Azure service and is shown next to single-service alternatives, so you can compare readiness and cost on the same basis. Key insights include: Readiness for every share — Ready, Ready with conditions, or Not ready — with the warnings that need attention before you move. A recommended Azure configuration per share. For example, a multi-protocol NetApp volume is recommended for Azure NetApp Files, while a general-purpose SMB share is recommended for Azure Files with a specific media type and redundancy. Provisioned size, IOPS, and throughput behind the recommendation, plus the reasoning Azure Migrate used to select the SKU and access tier. Monthly cost estimates per share and per path, an on-premises versus Azure TCO comparison, and estimated carbon savings. Next, you can generate a wave plan to sequence the migration or build a business case that helps you with cost modernizing Azure storage services. Assessment results showing the recommended path, source-to-target mappings, estimated Azure TCO, and carbon savings. Note: All screenshots in this post are from a sample environment. Cluster and share names, capacity values, readiness distributions, cost and TCO estimates, and emissions figures are illustrative and shown for reference and indicative purposes only. They are not a price quote. Your own results depend on your discovered environment, the assessment settings you choose, your target Azure region, and the pricing and offers that apply to your subscription. Prepare for migration with the right tool Assessment tells you where each share should go; Azure Migrate then points you at the tool to get it there. Azure Storage Mover is the recommended path for moving shares to Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage. For ONTAP volumes heading to Azure NetApp Files, the Azure NetApp Files migration assistant is recommended, and Azure File Sync remains the option for active sync and hybrid scenarios with Windows file servers. To learn more about our recommendations for unstructured data migration, visit https://aka.ms/migratemydata. Get started Update your Azure Migrate appliance, add your first NAS cluster, and let a discovery cycle run. Within a few hours you'll start to see a per-share picture of your NAS estate; you can then create an assessment to view the right target service to migrate to Azure. Learn more in our documentation. Connect and discover your NAS appliance Review discovered NAS resources Create a fileshare assessment of NAS shares Review NAS File share assessment recommendations Write to us at azurestoragemigrations@microsoft.com with questions or feedback, or to suggest additional NAS systems you’d like this capability to support. We look forward to hearing from you!More EDA Job Sets per Volume: Azure NetApp Files Raises the Performance Bar
Azure NetApp Files raises the performance ceiling for cloud-based electronic design automation (EDA) with a new independently published SPECstorage® Solution 2020 EDA_BLENDED result for a single large volume in breakthrough mode: 5,340 job sets, 2.4 million operations per second, 38,776 MB/s peak throughput, and 0.54 ms overall response time. Delivering 1.85 times the job sets, operations, and throughput of the previous single-volume result while preserving sub-millisecond latency through most load points, the result enables more concurrent simulations, shorter regression cycles, and better utilization of compute and tool licenses without dataset sharding. Combined with proven linear scale-out and generally available Azure NetApp Files cache volumes that provide on-demand access to on-premises data, it gives EDA teams a practical foundation for high-performance cloud deployment and bursting.Boost performance with NFS nconnect on Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution
Azure VMware Solution now supports nconnect=4 with Azure NetApp Files datastores each ESXi host opens up to four parallel TCP connections to a single NFS datastore, raising throughput and lowering latency under load. Supported on both Gen 1 and Gen 2 private clouds, it makes Azure VMware Solution with Azure NetApp Files an even stronger home for databases and other storage‑intensive workloads.Bringing Enterprise File Data to Users with Azure NetApp Files, Microsoft Foundry, and M365 Copilot
This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on extending AI to enterprise file data, showing how the knowledge pipeline is surfaced through enterprise AI agents and user experiences including Microsoft 365 Copilot.From Enterprise File Storage to an AI-Ready Data Foundation using Azure NetApp Files and OneLake
This 3-part series shows how to extend AI to enterprise file data – without migration – by combining Azure NetApp Files, OneLake, and a RAG-based architecture that surfaces grounded insights through enterprise AI agents. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series covering the data foundation, knowledge pipeline, and user experience layers.From File Data to AI‑Powered Knowledge Pipelines using Azure NetApp Files object REST API
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on extending AI to enterprise file data hosted on Azure NetApp Files, building on the data foundation to create a knowledge pipeline that makes enterprise file data usable by AI systems.From Scale to Breakthrough: Azure NetApp Files Sets a New Cloud Benchmark for EDA Performance
This article spotlights the newest leap in Azure NetApp Files: large volume breakthrough mode performance – independently validated by SPECstorage® Solution 2020 benchmarks. Azure NetApp Files is setting a new record for enterprise-scale Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads in the cloud. Backed by benchmark results at enterprise scale, it further reduces the traditional tradeoff between massive scale and uncompromising storage performance. For EDA teams, this means storage can keep pace with design cycles – enabling faster iteration, supporting cloud-first workflows, and reducing time spent waiting on infrastructure.AHEAD helps us launch the Strategic Azure Storage Services Partner Program
AHEAD becomes the first Azure Storage Strategic Channel Partner by demonstrating their expertise in helping customers select the ideal Azure Storage, or Azure Storage ISV, Service to offer the ideal price / performance solution for their application and helping customers to migrate to Azure quickly and safely.SAP System Refresh and Cloning operations on Azure NetApp Files with SnapCenter
Discover the power of SAP HANA on Azure NetApp Files with seamless system refresh and cloning operations using SnapCenter. This innovative solution leverages Azure NetApp Files snapshot and volume cloning capabilities to provide end-to-end workflows for data protection and SAP system refresh operations. Whether you need to create system copies for testing, address logical corruption, or perform disaster recovery failover tests, SnapCenter ensures quick and efficient processes, saving you time and resources.SAP HANA data protection on Azure NetApp Files with SnapCenter
Efficient and fast data protection and recovery of SAP HANA running on Azure NetApp Files with SnapCenter introduction, configuration, backup and restore. Ensure the highest level of data protection for your SAP HANA systems with Azure NetApp Files. Leveraging the robust capabilities of Azure NetApp Files, NetApp SnapCenter backup and recovery offers seamless snapshot-based backup and restore operations. This solution provides the ability to efficiently offload snapshots to an Azure storage account for longer term retention, ensuring fast data protection and recovery for SAP applications.
