Microsoft Azure Block Storage Reviews

We use it for high-speed data and a very critical mission.

Block storage is typically used when you have structured data. For example, RDP systems like SQL Oracle and the SQL DB tool. If you have structured data, you need Microsoft Azure Block Storage.

The solution should also support unstructured data. There is a different file format for unstructured data. It would also be good if the solution notification features.

We have been using this solution for three years. Microsoft Azure Block Storage is deployed as per the requirement. It can be deployed independently and supports every kind of deployment.

It is very stable, and I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

It is scalable, and I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support is very good.

The setup is not as simple as File Storage, and it requires a lot of investment because block storage requires a high-speed network, and you have to deploy a lot of fibre cables. It is also costly and not cheap compared to Internet-based networks. So the initial investment cost for deploying the block storage is very expensive.

The price depends on the requirement. If the data is critical, you must deploy block storage. But if it is not that critical, you can choose cheaper storage options. I rate the pricing for Microsoft Azure Block Storage a two out of ten.

Multiple vendors offer good block storage solutions, such as BMC Storage, NetApp Storage, Azure, Google and Oracle. Microsoft Azure Block Storage is deployed for mission-critical and business-critical data. When deploying these kinds of data, you must have a data center to control moving the data and allow multiple storages. You can know where the data is stored, which software controls the data, and who manages your data. But for cloud, the customer does not have any visibility or know who is responsible for managing data or whether it's secured. Therefore, transparency, control and storage deployment is significant.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten, and I would recommend this to others.

We use the hybrid version of Microsoft Azure Block Storage. We have a client based in the UK who utilizes the hybrid cloud. We also have a couple of archiving solutions there, as well as NetApp on TapCloud. 

The NFS solution goes into that, deployment is purely on the Azure cloud. The production areas and archiving solutions are mostly done on-premises, while testing and application development in some areas is purely cloud-based.

Block storage is used for the data that is configured for our servers. We have it for auditing purposes and as a compliance method.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is a stable solution.

As for scalability, we use other archiving solutions, NetApp on TapCloud, for example, because there are some limitations with capacity unless you extend the terabytes of data.

It has been a couple of years since I contacted support. However, at that time, it was difficult to get someone on the call even though it was an issue of high severity.

Positive

The initial setup for the production areas was on-premises, which is very simple.

Azure Block Storage is higher priced than its competitors. It is costly. The pricing is difficult to calculate as there are different tiers to select from. 

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is widely accepted. People are choosing the enterprise solution. I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the tool for static website hosting and log storage. My company also uses it to store static information, and as a backup solution to store files.

I like the product’s versioning and file share features. The file share feature is most useful when we are connecting on-premises services. Azure file share helps to migrate small data amounts from on-premises to the cloud.

I find the user interface of newer versions, particularly, the flows, not user-friendly. The UI of Azure’s initial version was very comfortable. I didn’t have to remember floor menus. I knew where I had to go to see the logs or grab configuration parameters.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The tool’s stability is fine and I would rate it a ten out of ten.

I would rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten. The product has become a common requirement for all projects. Almost all people in my company use it. There are more than 100 users for the solution in our company. We are a startup, and not a big company.

The solution’s support is very helpful. Whenever I am at a dead end or need help, I would seek the product’s support which is like an ex-colleague to me. I had had some incidents where there were outages.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is simple and straightforward.

The tool’s deployment was done by our in-house team members.

I would rate the solution’s pricing a nine out of ten and it’s cheaper than Amazon S3.

I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. Azure has better usability and user experience compared to Amazon S3. Both products have similar functionality and I would say that both of them have reached saturation. S3’s storage account is also costlier compared to Azure. S3 is also complex in configuration and UI is not user-friendly like Azure.

We use Microsoft Azure Block Storage for storing files. We don't use it for anything else.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage has the same features as other solutions, but I like that its implementation process is straightforward.

The performance of Microsoft Azure Block Storage needs improvement because it's laggy. My company used it in different places, including the Microsoft browser, but it still lags.

Pricing for the product is another area for improvement.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage also has a lot of limitations on file sizes. The rendering and loading times also need improvement. Sometimes, Microsoft Azure Block Storage crashes, an issue that needs to be taken care of promptly, but Microsoft hasn't been able to do that for a very long time.

I've been using Microsoft Azure Block Storage for many years since its inception.

I didn't find Microsoft Azure Block Storage stable or secure.

I would not even think of scaling Microsoft Azure Block Storage based on its current performance.

The technical support for Microsoft Azure Block Storage is horrible. Whenever my team reaches out, Microsoft support will keep escalating the issue because of a lack of expertise, so my company ends up paying for useless technical consultations. The support team could be more knowledgeable.

We use Microsoft Azure Block Storage, but usage is limited to specific clients because it comes with very high pricing.

The initial setup for Microsoft Azure Block Storage is simple. It's more of tweaking the connection settings or connecting it to your DB.

Deploying the product took two hours.

The pricing for Microsoft Azure Block Storage is high because of MSA and SBA contracts, where Microsoft takes care of the security aspects, apart from the maintenance, and Microsoft has service level agreements with the customers. On the other hand, AWS requires you to purchase items independently, so my company only typically refers Microsoft Azure Block Storage to other clients if the client signed an MSA with Microsoft.

Both Microsoft Azure Block Storage and AWS cost hundreds of dollars. The licensing for Microsoft Azure Block Storage is yearly. How much you pay depends on the amount of storage. Microsoft will start charging you from $100 to a few hundred per month, depending on how much you're trying to store.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage has hundreds of items inside, so each item has its own cost.

We tried Google Cloud Storage, but we had a terrible experience with the product because, at the time, Google was new in the market.

I would not recommend Microsoft Azure Block Storage to others, especially if you plan to use it for business purposes, because it's laggy.

My company has several clients on Microsoft Azure Block Storage, but it's been trying to get clients off it.

I advise anyone looking into using Microsoft Azure Block Storage not to. It's best to try avoiding Microsoft Azure-related microservices. Microsoft Azure is good on the dev ops side, such as Kubernetes, but not on storage or other services because Microsoft Azure has its version of services. Still, AWS overshadows Microsoft every single time. For example, if you want to do some heavy deployment, then Microsoft Azure Kubernetes, which is more of a database cluster, is nice. The pricing is also good for Microsoft Azure Kubernetes versus AWS, which has premium pricing, but it is still trying to figure out its solution in this area. Microsoft and AWS have different packages and offerings, so it's up to you to choose wisely. Go for AWS for scalability and Microsoft for reliability and security, in the dev ops area, for example.

My  Microsoft Azure Block Storage rating is four out of ten because of its file size limitations, stability, and technical support.

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.

We use the solution for several key purposes: first, as a source code repository; second, for software testing life cycle management, including test cases and bug tracking; and third, for deploying our projects through pipelines, supporting continuous deployment and continuous integration.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage has high-security features and is very reliable. Its maintenance is done through the cloud, which reduces costs. 

Microsoft Azure Block Storage needs to improve its migration and reporting processes. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

My company has 35-50 users. 

We chose Microsoft Azure Blob Storage because we've been using their solutions for a long time, starting from Team Foundation Server since 2010 and even earlier with Visual SourceSafe. We kept upgrading versions, which led us to adopt Azure Cloud. Additionally, the licensing cost was favorable for us. 

Deploying the tool is easy, but we encountered challenges while migrating our old repositories from EFS 2015 and 2019. The main issue was that we had to migrate the entire default collection to do it properly, and there wasn't a straightforward way to handle this. For example, while test cases must be migrated through the default collection, repositories for source code can be migrated alone, which poses a significant challenge for us.

It generally took more than a day to set up and plan everything for on-premises setup. For cloud installations, it was easier because you could pick items from Microsoft storage or repositories and switch them on. However, final configurations for pipelines and other elements still require significant time.

We expect ROI through cost reduction after three years. 

I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

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

We primarily use the solution for storage. 

The storage is great. It's easy to upload files. 

The stability seems to be very reliable.

It's a very scalable solution. 

I like the storage explorer feature. 

I cannot recall coming across any missing features. 

I have experience in resolving various issues, however, troubleshooting can be sometimes very difficult as items are not very well documented. If the documentation could be improved then it would be very good. Right now, if you face a question, you have to guess how it works or you have to test your hypothesis. This would be great for newer, more basic users. 

I have explored the solution several times in the past and have used it maybe for almost a year. I work with it almost on a daily basis.

I have never had any issues with eh stability. I've never dealt with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's stable and reliable. 

The solution scales well. If a company wants to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem. 

I've never directly dealt with technical support. I can't comment on how helpful they would be if issues came up. 

I have experience with Databricks and I'd not say that there isn't much of a difference. I tend to prefer Azure as everything is under one umbrella. 

The solution was not deployed by me directly. 

I'm just an end-user. I don't have any special arrangements with the company. 

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. I haven't had any issues with it at all. 

We integrated Commvault as the customer's backup solution, allowing us to copy the backups to their Azure infrastructure via Block Storage. In Commvault, we configured Block Storage as the destination to write the data for the backup.

The solution is easy to purchase and is a Microsoft product, making procurement straightforward. Additionally, the majority of engineers have extensive knowledge of Block Storage, meaning that if this solution is implemented in any organization, it is easy to find a support person who is well-versed in the product. Technically, this solution has a lot of features, such as deduplication, to choose from.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage can improve the configuration to be more user-friendly.

The solution's user interface can be more user-friendly.

I have been using the solution for three years.

We implemented the solution six to seven months ago, and we have not encountered many challenges. We have faced some minor operational issues, but overall it is functioning as expected.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten.

We have over 25,000 customers using the solution.

We will receive the necessary support for the integration and supporting aspects. Microsoft's full-time support team is always available to provide assistance with various processes.

Positive

With an Azure level of understanding, the solution is relatively straightforward to implement. However, from a technical standpoint, it is not the most straightforward to configure, and so I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We implement the solution for our clients.

Customers with an enterprise agreement typically receive Microsoft products at a discounted rate compared to other products.

The cost of procuring storage depends on the customer's license availability. If the customer has an EA agreement in their price agreement with Microsoft, they can access storage at a cheaper price. However, if they do not have the EA agreement, they will incur a higher cost.

When comparing G-Cloud and AWS to Azure, the challenge isn't necessarily from other products, but rather the customers seem to have a greater investment in Azure.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.