Microsoft Azure Block Storage Reviews

We use it as a storage backend for our analytical use cases and we do modeling in the Azure Databricks environment. We store huge chunks of data in terms of terabytes. We use this data to gain insights into our modeling platform. We find it cheaper than storing it on-premise. And it does not require infrastructure maintenance.

It has improved my organization by reducing costs by 90%. There's still no infrastructure engineering involved for the maintenance and it's easy to use.

The tier feature in V2 is the most valuable feature of this solution. It enables you to move your storage from hot tier to cold tier into archive tier.

That is one of the features I liked it better than a version V1 because V1did not have this feature.version. Because of it, we can save costs on storage.

There is a folder inside the block storage. I am not able to delete the folder completely from the portal. I need to go delete the file inside and then I will be able to delete the folders.

We don't delete the other tools from the folder directly. There's no folder deletion option in Azure Block Storage. It would be nice if they could update this. 

I have been using Azure Block Storage for four years.

We haven't had any problems with stability. 

It's a pretty simple solution and it scales up automatically when the data size goes up. It scales up and the costs increase accordingly.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did the deployment ourselves. They have good online documentation.  Producing the storage account took about 10 minutes max. The overall configuration took maybe 10 minutes. To make it work properly took around one hour.

It only took one person to deploy it.

Most of the users use it as the default storage. We have close to 1,000 users using this solution.  

It requires one person per team to maintain it. so maybe one person per team, it would be a maximum of a hundred people. 

It's used across the organization by the technology team and the data science team. We're not looking to expand the usage because I feel that at least this part of the solution has reached the desired audience.

Our ROI is that it has reduced our costs by 90%.

The amount for storage we used to pay $1,000 per month, now we only pay around $10.

For the first 50DB, they cost around $50. 

It's an open solution for everybody. Anybody can go to the Microsoft website and they can get the pricing for it. But the first 50GB of data is a default rate and then it increases for the next 500GB or something like that.

It is a pay as you go solution. The more you use, the more you pay. That's normally how you pay for any cloud solutions.

We also evaluated Amazon, AWS, Microsoft, and Google cloud.

You will need high-speed bandwidth internet and a contact center for Microsoft for billing purposes. It is kind of a drag and drop and it is pretty simple to use. There is a small learning curve. 

If you create a folder at least one sample file has to be there. So sometimes it becomes irrelevant because unnecessarily I put a normal dummy file. And then from tomorrow onwards when the data starts doing it I delete the dummy file when the actual data is there. I find that pretty cumbersome. In the next release, I would like for them to update this.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that Microsoft solutions are easy to use. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The use case for Microsoft Azure Block Storage depends on the project and the users. Still, I use it for storing and extracting data, such as images, videos, and documents.

What I like best about Microsoft Azure Block Storage is the accessibility because it's very easy for me to access it. Microsoft takes the user's approach, so you don't have to take many steps before accessing the tool. As soon as you create Microsoft Azure Block Storage resources, you'll automatically find it easy to use it.

If you need to learn how to start, you'll find different resources and documentation about the tool, so this is another pro of Microsoft Azure Block Storage.

Another advantage of using the tool is that it's convenient because if you want to deploy new infrastructure, you can connect to the cloud and download the files to your new site.

I found that everything works fine in Microsoft Azure Block Storage; though it may be because I have less experience with it, I cannot give any areas for improvement.

I want to see my region added to the data center. I'm in Africa, and if a data center is specifically added under Central Africa, that will reduce data latency when accessing data. Right now, you can only find the USA, China, Europe, South Africa, and Egypt, but no Central Africa. It'll be great if Microsoft can add my region or location as a data center for Microsoft Azure Block Storage. Doing that will respect privacy, too.

I've used Microsoft Azure Block Storage for six months. It depends on the project I'm working on.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is scalable. When you use Azure File Sync, Microsoft gives you five terabytes of storage on Microsoft Azure Block Storage. You can scale by paying for a group or a big enterprise if you have a considerable amount of data.

I didn't have to contact the technical support team of Microsoft Azure Block Storage because I had all that I needed from the documentation.

I didn't use a different solution. I only used Microsoft Azure Block Storage. You can integrate it with various services, and it has the facility to connect to your site and communicate with it, but I don't require that. Enterprises can use that functionality of Microsoft Azure Block Storage, though.

Setting up Microsoft Azure Block Storage was easy, and it only took two minutes. I researched how to do it, but before you set up Microsoft Azure Block Storage, you must create your agile accounts first, and inside the agile accounts, you'll find different types of storage. In my case, I chose Microsoft Azure Block Storage for data storage and extraction. It was easy to set up.

I deployed Microsoft Azure Block Storage.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is a good investment. The tool helps an enterprise save data in the cloud. Sometimes there is a natural disaster, or your electricity is cut off. Sometimes your physical servers can have problems. You can store data in the cloud through Microsoft Azure Block Storage to avoid problems, so it's a good investment.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is not an expensive tool. I'm subscribed to the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors program, so Microsoft gives me between $120 to $150 credit each month. It's renewable, and if I use that credit for Microsoft Azure Block Storage, it'll not consume half of my credit, so I'd say it's very cheap.

I use Microsoft Azure Block Storage personally. My company doesn't use it.

I recommend the tool to others who want to use it.

Based on my experience, I rate Microsoft Azure Block Storage nine out of ten.

Azure Block Storage is for integrating and storing logs and things like that. It's for short and medium-term intermediate storage. Around 3,000 people are using the solution indirectly. 

The security is poor, and the sharing model is confusing, conceptually. I'd prefer not to use it. I'd like a user-friendly web interface and a better security model. 

I've worked with Azure Block Storage for a few years. 

The block storage itself is good, but Azure's overall reliability is poor, especially in this region. It usually goes down a couple of times a month. 

I rate Azure support six out of 10. It could be better. I get an answer, but it takes a while. 

Neutral

The other solution we use heavily is Google Cloud Storage. I prefer Google because it's easier to set up and you don't need to download a client. It's just simpler overall.

Everyone is familiar with the Google interface. It's essential because you're dealing with a lot of technologies, and people don't have the time anymore to figure it out.

Setting up Azure Block Storage is more complex than it should be.

The price is decent. I rate Azure Block Storage eight out of 10 for affordability.

I rate Azure Block Storage three out of 10. It's just storage, and it's more complicated than it needs to be. 

We use the solution for application hosting only - in terms of giving an application which is serving to some customers, for a particular location service. 

From a UI perspective, we like the workflows. Its look and feel are quite good. 

The initial setup is quite simple and straightforward, especially if you have IT knowledge. 

It is very flexible and scalable. It's very easy to adjust the data. 

The stability is good.

As a technology product, it's always evolving. There are some feature challenges from my side, however, I am hopeful they will fix the issues. 

The integrations right now are limited, however, we are hopeful this will improve as the cloud continues to develop. We would like to see more capabilities in specifically hybrid scenarios. There are some third-party tools in Oracle and Linux we'd like to have access to via this product.

We'd like more failover capabilities or data recovery options. 

I've been using the solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. There are no issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

It is a scalable solution. If you need to expand it, it's not a problem. 

We have about 50 users on this solution currently.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not very complex. It's much easier if you do some planning and can anticipate some outcomes. Doing that work makes everything easier as you do the implementation. Those with IT backgrounds will find it easier to handle the setup as opposed to those who are not so technical.

The pricing varies. You might have different pricing, for example, in relation to your country or region. It's not standard. We pay around $300 to $400 a month for some scenarios where consumption is limited. However, going forward, we're seeing the likelihood of the cost coming to around $2,000 as consumption rises. 

We have never actually attempted to evaluate this solution in comparison to others. 

I would recommend the solution to others.

I would rate it eight out of ten.

Block Storage can be used for storing files of varying formats. It can be used as an object storage as well, so people can dump a variety of files into it. It's called a storage account, actually. This storage account can be used to store any application-specific files and there could be different Azure services which can consume the files, like that storage account, as part of the architecture. There could be an application storing the data, and there could be some other service that picks those files up from there. This solution is part of that entire architecture. It's kind of similar to a history you have in a website. It is almost exactly the same as that.

It has capabilities such as versioning and, from a security point of view, you can also back it up. It has resiliency features as well.

You can have GRS, like a during and end storage feature, enabled so that it can be replicated to a secondary region in Azure. This can prevent an outage in the primary region. 

There is a drawback or limitation to the GRS storage feature because depending on the amount of data, it could take a lot of time. There are a lot of steps from the application perspective, so it's not easy and straightforward from a business continuity perspective. That is one of the limitations I see in the solution. 

It's about the time it takes to revert back. The failover takes a couple of minutes but then it takes a lot of time to fail it back to the primary region again, so you have to do a synchronization again. That's a bit of a challenge because if it contains a lot of data in terabytes, the cost to do a replication again but reverse the direction from secondary to primary is a bit extra. Obviously, though, this only happens when there is an out, when a DR is involved, so it's not very often that companies would come across this. It's only in the worst case scenario. 

It's not a big thing, but some companies have limited time for their DR, like there's a RPO, or a recovery point objective and recovery time objective, that is very short. In that case, this product may not be suitable or may not meet their customer's requirements. That is something that Microsoft should focus on, to bring the time down or make that process, the DR process, a bit easier for this product. Maybe as they continually improve this product they can add improvements in this aspect to reduce that DR time, recovery time, for the solution.

I have been working with this product for about four or five years.

I have seen this solution be pretty stable. I've never had an issue with it. I'd rate the stability as a five out of five. 

It's very scalable. It has really high limits, so I don't think most customers will hit that limit. I'll give it a five out of five for scalability. 

Big enterprises as well as medium enterprises use this solution, and even smaller enterprises. There are organizations with 100 users, 1000, and even some with 5000 and above. There could be only applications consuming this, or end users also, but the end users directly connecting to the solution are a lot less.

It's mostly the developers who configure the application to use this solution as the object storage. Eventually, the end users of the application could be in the 1000s, and they utilize this back end solution via the application, so it is getting utilized by the end users, but it's via the application.

There was one issue I had with the backup. I didn't get a proper response and it took a couple of days for the response. It turned out to be a restriction and limitation, so it didn't get solved, but I was told that it was a limitation. I would rate the technical support as a three out of five.

The solution can be deployed manually from the Azure portal, or it can be done programmatically, via code. The setup is very easy and straightforward. It only takes a few minutes. I rate it a five out of five. 

I have deployed this solution for customers, and just one person is required for deployment. Anybody who has knowledge of Azure and has some administrative experience in Azure can do this. It's a very straightforward solution to deploy.

There is hardly any configuration in this solution, so it's maybe a day's task to deploy, but not beyond that. Once the design for this product is confirmed and completed, then the deployment is just following those design inputs which have been already signed off on by the customer. Customer requirements and specific features that need to be enabled in this tool need to be finalized first, which happens in the design phase. Once all of that is finalized, deploying it with the agreed configuration can be done in a day, max.

It's fairly cheap and it's also fully managed by Microsoft, so you don't have to manage the storage as much.

The solution is pay as you go, so it depends on the amount of data that is stored and the transactions. There's no licensing requirements. Also, we can have a subscription, like reservations for the storage. If we have a lot of data, then that can help reduce the cost, at least to some extent. The technical support is part of the support plan. 

The price depends on each customer. If they use a lot of data, the cost can be very high. I think it would be the same case with other tools as well, though, so it is quite affordable. 

The solution has life-cycle management, versioning, and a lot of protection features like sub-delete and all of that. It's pretty much complete, so it satisfies most of my customers' needs and requirements. I recommend this product because it is straightforward and well-documented.

I would rate the solution as an eight out of ten.

I think Azure has three versions. They have Block Blob Storage, then they also have the Gen1 and the Gen2 versions. Gen2 was kind of under review until just recently in 2020, but I think they have officially launched Gen2 now. Block Storage is an Azure product, but I am not sure if it has a version. I just know it as Azure Block Blob Storage.  

Our use case for Block Storage came about when we were building a database for one of our customers on public storage. The customer kept their data on-premises and on their own servers. We would get that data from them and put it into the Block Storage. So Block was being used as a file depository.  

I think there are several valuable features in the product. The security technically is good, but they require a lot of security rules to be set up. Even so, it was kind of easy to configure. So the security is good.  

I think the ease-of-use is also good because we can even upload files up from one machine onto other blob storage, another nice feature that is also provided. Apart from that, Azure also provides Azure Storage Explorer, which can be used to access Blob data once you map it onto a local machine.  

I think also its scalability is a good feature. You can put terabytes of data into Blob Storage. So that is also one of the beneficial features of Blob.  

Azure had the Blob version prior to Block. Azure also realized that Blob Storage did not really have any main space. So, that was a limitation of the Azure Blob product. But that is also the reason why they decided to develop the Gen2 version, which puts back all the right structure for the storage and capacity.  

So, it is good to explore Gen2 as another solution. I think most of the users would eventually move from Blob Storage to Gen2 only because of the space limitations of Blob.  

You also do not see the kind of folder search capability in Blob that you might expect. Like when you are in windows, you can just go to a particular folder and you can browse within that folder and you can go into subfolders and search there as well. That feature is kind of missing in the Blob product.  

So the inability to easily search subfolders and also the space limitation of Blob are really the biggest limitations of the product.  

What I would like to see in the next release — and I am not really sure if it is possible in cloud solutions — but it would be nice to provide a feature for being able to distribute large files.  

I was using Azure Block Storage for almost all of 2019.  

I think it a stable product.  

It is scalable.  

I think our team that worked on the Blob project was about ten members. That company was would qualify as a large company itself. This was a new solution that we were going to build for the company. I would say the size of their team was smaller than ours, but in terms of the team size and what they needed for maintenance, I think Azure Block was an adequate product to use.  

We had one admin on the team which is kind of required to set it up because of the security aspect. But I think Azure Block can be set up by just the developer alone. The main users of Azure Blob are always mostly developers and testers.  

I have had only one experience with Azure technical support and that was not for Blob. It was something else. But I am still really in touch with Azure support. I had put a call over there pending for a priority-one ticket. They have continued calling me to see if things are going okay and they are very friendly. So I would say I could definitely rate their technical support as nine-out-of-ten.  

When we approached the project for the client who we first deployed Block Storage for, this was a new platform for this customer. We looked at new opportunities. Prior to this, I used Hadoop. I was not the biggest consumer of the product but gained enough experience while using Hadoop as a file storage solution to see enough to know that setting it up takes a while. It was not very user-friendly. Azure is not even comparable because it is very user-friendly.  

Azure Blob Storage is very straightforward to setup. It is just about setting up a storage account, putting in a container, and that is all. It is pretty easy. It really takes just a few minutes.  

I have been looking into data warehousing technology for quite some time. I have experience on Teradata and I have experience on Azure. I have used Azure Data Factory and I have used Azure Databricks. I have been happy with the Azure products so this has played into my decisions.  

The advice I would give people about Block Storage is that I might recommend the product based upon the use cases and storage needs. Otherwise, if they are looking for something more robust, I would recommend using the Gen2 version, which is the biggest storage system of the Azure options.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Azure Block Storage as at least seven-out-of-ten. This is a seven primarily because of this Gen2 release. When it comes down to it, Gen2 is a more advanced product and other than when it comes to the price most of the users will not see Block Storage as a better solution.  

We are using Microsoft Azure Block Storage primarily for transferring data through the FTP. The system stores data that is sent to it and we create information reports going out. Additionally, we store data from logic applications and message logs in a storage channel.

We have different deployments of the solution, such as hybrid, cloud, and on-premise.

One of our clients is utilizing an on-premise warehouse management system with two interconnected data centers for data transfer, ensuring disaster recovery. Their system utilizes JDA web query due to its seamless integration with their warehouse machines. To enhance their operations, they have hired Azure-implemented API-driven solutions using logic apps and other tools. 

We are using Power BI and data gateway to extract data from Oracle tables and databases. While we try to utilize logistic data to answer queries, we have a series of APIs available, which they often call upon using established logic apps.

The solution can be used for many purposes it is flexible.

The most helpful features of Microsoft Azure Block Storage are the many use cases. Additionally, it can be locked down well and has two-factor authentication.

The solution has been improving over the time I have used it with new features, such as private links and managing identities.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage could improve the SFTP. The SFTP can be used for exchanging data between two parties and it works but Microsoft is new to this market and they could be a lot better in this area with its features.

The querying could be improved in the storage system. SQL is a fundamental technology but there are only partition rules and row IDs, and it is slow to query the data.

The day and time stamps are not indexed in any way which makes it very slow. Additionally, if you wanted to remove all the data over a month, there is no option to do so. There are areas that the solution can improve on in the future.

I have been using Microsoft Azure Block Storage for approximately four years.

The stability of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is good, I have not had an issue.

The solution is highly scalable and there are not a lot of limits. However, you do have to pay money for scalability.

We've never had to seek support for setup for Microsoft Azure Block Storage as it has always been relatively simple. With numerous YouTube videos and Microsoft Learn providing active examples, we were able to set everything up with ease. In most cases, the instructions were straightforward, and we only needed to follow them.

Having used Amazon S3 before, Microsoft Azure Block Storage is superior because it offers much more than just block storage. It has various other functionalities, allowing users to store files, tables, media, and more. It's a versatile storage solution that we're using for content delivery networks, coupled with the Microsoft content delivery network. Overall, it's an excellent storage management solution.

The solution is easy to set up.

The price of scaling the solution is not expensive.

I rate Microsoft Azure Block Storage a nine out of ten.

We have embarked on the journey of the global data list. All the data from the SAP systems, all the data from external vendors, and all the data from our enterprise data warehouse are staged onto the Azure Block Storage. It forms the basis of the Lakehouse architecture. That's the staging layer for us.

It has helped to centralize the data. People see it as the central source of truth. Everybody sees the same set of data across data analysts, business analysts, data scientists, and all the visualization people. It provides a centralized view of the same data.

The product offers hierarchical storage and we like the main space storage with business.

It's easy to set up.

We find the product to be stable. 

It is very scalable. 

The solution needs a direct connection to visualization. Power BI connectivity on this platform is not that great. We need a direct connection to any of the visualization tools. There should be more BI integrations.

Block Storage is something which I use on a day-to-day basis. I've used the solution for six years at least.

It's pretty stable. It has cloning and therefore has data redundancy. The disaster recovery is pretty easy with this solution.

The solution can scale well.

The solution is used across the organization in BI and data visualization leads. There are more than 300 people using it.

The use is increasing month to month with more and more data being placed into it. It's an ongoing process.

Technical support is very good. 

This was the default product we went with thanks to our partnership with Microsoft.

The initial setup was straightforward, not that complex. 

Setting up was probably a month's time, not more.

The DevOps engineers would be required for the deployment. In fact, data engineers can do it if there's no proper CIC mechanism, however, any DevOps expert can do it.

We handled the deployment in-house. 

I'm from the technology side, so I have not done that ROI comparison. It is not visible to me directly. However, I have heard that there was a bottom-line increase. 

The storage part costs us $223. That's on a monthly basis for 20TB of data storage. There are no additional costs.

We did not look into other options. 

I am a customer of Microsoft products.

We are dealing with the Azure Block ADLS Gen 2.

People should use the mechanism to save more costs. We have a hot tier and a cold tier, wherein, say you want to save more on your cost, the frequently accessed data should be in the hot, and data that is not accessed frequently should be moved to the cold tier. It helps in reducing costs by almost 50%. The tiering mechanism should be used and new users should know it is possible to arrange their data that way. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.