Microsoft Azure Block Storage Reviews

We use Microsoft Azure Block Storage to store files uploaded by our users.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is its performance.

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

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is stable.

The scalability of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is good.

We have less than five people using this solution in my organization. We do not have plans to increase the usage.

I have contacted the support once and I had a good experience.

I have previously used Google Drive.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is more complex than Google Drive, but it is still not too difficult.

I did the implementation of the solution in-house.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is an expensive solution and I pay monthly.

We use one person for the maintenance of the solution.

I would recommend Google Drive instead of Microsoft Azure Block Storage.

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

It's mainly for financial institutions and customers. These customers are all using Cloud Native types of applications, whether it is Oracle Fusion or whether it's AWS. We are using the solution to handle the APIs.

Its integration is very easy.

The accuracy is relatively high.

It is stable and reliable.

The product can scale well.

The implementation can be quite technical.

We would like the solution to lower the costs as much as possible. It’s always better for the customer if it is less expensive.

I’ve been dealing with the solution for six months.

The solution is stable. It’s reliable, and the performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze.

The solution is definitely scalable. It’s not a problem to expand it. If a company wants to, it can scale the product.

One client usually has about 1,000 assets to scan.

I’ve never had to use technical support. So far, the solution has been trouble-free.

My engineer can complete an installation in one or two days. I don't directly deal with it as it's quite complex. You need to be technical. It’s not for non-technical people.

We have five people that can handle deployment and maintenance. They are systems and ops engineers.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations.

I’d rate the solution seven out of ten.

Of all the features I have used, it works great. While some require development, you don't need to for all of them. 

There are various types of storage to choose from - blob, table, and queue.

The initial setup is simple.

It has great documentation and community support.

When I installed Azure Explorer on my system, I connected easily, and, for uploading data and uploading any value or any files from there, it was very easy. However, when it's there in Azure Blob, Azure Portal, then uploading, downloading, or viewing the file is a little bit difficult. That's the part they need to improve. Downloading and uploading could be easier.

They could create more readability of files. We can use other solutions in desktop versions and then we can connect those Azure files. However, if anyone is working maybe in Linux or other things, then the Azure Portal is best for them. The readability is easier.

I've been working on the solution for more than 12 months.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's like creating normal Windows files. Each time you have to create a file though, you can create it using CLI. However, if it's only a storage file and you can store large amounts, large volumes, of details. Scaling is simple. I have not had any challenge regarding Blob Storage, as I do not have much data actually. I haven't used it on a large scale. That's why I don't find any scalability challenges myself, actually.

While we have Microsoft technical support, I didn't take any Microsoft technical support yet, as their documentation is enough for me. If I get into any problems, I look for solution documentation or community help. That's enough for me.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not difficult.

I haven't compared the solution to any other solutions just yet. We only deal with Azure.

I'm an end-user. I'd recommend this solution to others. I would rate it as eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for migration to restore data and to help us migrate to other systems. I do occasionally also use it as a backup, but not very often. Mostly, it's used for migration and we installed Microsoft on it. We store it in the cloud and migrate everything over.

The solution offers tiers of storage, depending on what we want to do. 

If I want to store my data for a very long period of time and I know that I'm going to archive it, I just do the archive.

You can easily access your data whenever you need it.

Uploading of data could be improved. Currently, the only way you can upload your data is by using their storage explorer. You need to use a command line to do that. Then, maybe you can go online and you can use their explorer to check to see if it's there. If they had a third-party application to handle the upload, it would be better. Many people aren't familiar with command lines for uploading data. It makes it more difficult for many users.

The pricing is a bit high.

I've been using the solution for a year or two.

The solution is very stable. I'd say it's 99.9% stable. Microsoft is very good.

I believe it is possible to scale the solution, although I haven't tried to yet personally.

It's been a long time since I've contacted technical support, but I did reach out once when I was having latency issues. I contacted them and they were able to resolve the issue. When you reach out to them for assistance, they call you immediately.

I didn't previously use a different solution. My email was hosted on Microsoft, so I moved to Azure.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not very complicated. We handled the deployment in stages. It took, at maximum, just over a week.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

The pricing is pay-as-you-go, so it runs on credit. The more storage a company has, the more they pay. If you are putting data into an archive, it doesn't cost too much, but if you need to access it, the price may be a bit high.

I'm a Microsoft partner and I deploy the solution for other customers.

Currently, I'm the only user on the solution. I don't use it every day; I use it only when I need to.

The solution is quite good and is easy to integrate with other systems, You can also integrate it as a backup for your recordings.

It's also easily accessible and, because it's on the cloud, it doesn't matter where your current location is. It allows for easy replication of data on different levels. 

For these reasons, I'd recommend the product. I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It's a bit expensive. If it was more reasonably priced I'd rate it higher.

Our customers basically use this program for virtual data center extension, as a hybrid extension of their local or on-prem or private data center. It offers them an automated way of running new workloads or creating new workloads with governance on it.

The reason why people choose this solution is that it has a good infrastructure. It also offers an easy way to provide workloads. We mainly use this solution for the development, testing, and production of our data and infrastructure in a standardized way. I also like the fact that the deployment is fast.

I would like to see an improvement in the networking and cost transparency part. What I mean by this, is that we provide certain workflows for our customers and we usually calculate what is local, but even then it's not really upfront. We must know what the usage will be in DMs. So the price is different, and that is where provisioning and cost transparency comes in. We must know what it will cost in the OPEX work that we do. We do have some cost analysis, overdose cloud, but still, it's not always the right amount that's reflected for our customers for each application or each analysis that they want to do. The invoice type is therefore different for each client.

The company I work for has been using Microsoft Azure Block Storage for two to three years and I've been using it for almost a year now.

Most customers are happy with the stability. Some bigger customers, however, have experienced problems with the stability of the Azure cloud. 

One can easily scale with this program so I am satisfied with the scalability. 

I haven't used customer service before.

Our setup is rather complex. It is easier for our customers - they simply get the tenants in our products and within the tenants, we just plug in all the drivers on-prem and then he gets a complete insight of the overall workload. 

I am, however, not involved in the installation. Another difficult thing is to create a good architecture that's strong on networking and that will enable customers to deploy or provide all those different environments in an easy way. So the thinking is critical, and architecture is very important, which is kind of complex. 

Deployment takes between two to five days, depending on the customer and the speed on the cloud.

We have a power desk with three people who are responsible for support and maintenance, customer queries, etc. 

The solution is affordable and we only pay for what we use. There are additional costs for backup and disaster management and we use separate products as service providers.

I personally feel that this is a good program. My advice to others is that they should determine beforehand what they want to use it for. The biggest lesson I've learned so far is that, if you go to the backup part, you have to be careful about how you do the backups and what the retention times are. 

I would like to see improved file sharing and better security in the next release. 

On a scale from one to ten, I will rate this program an eight. 

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is the security and the management of user access from on-premise to the cloud.

Microsoft Azure Block Storage could improve by allowing the switching of the hot tier to the cold tier.

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

Microsoft Azure Block Storage is stable.

The solution can expand, and it is scalable.

We have approximately 200 users using this solution. We plan to increase the usage of this solution in the future.

I did not use the support from Microsoft Azure Block Storage. However, I did use the support for other solutions. 

We deploy Microsoft Azure Block Storage with Linux SUSE or Red Hat, but Microsoft will not give us support for these solutions.

I rate the support from Microsoft a three out of five.

Neutral

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Block Storage is simple.

The price could be more flexible, and it can be expensive.

I rate the price of Microsoft Azure Block Storage a three out of five.

I have not evaluated other solutions.

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

We use this solution for the availability and to archive data. I am using the latest version.

It provides secure cloud storage.

The performance could be improved, but all the services in the cloud are improved every week.

I have used Azure Block Storage for many years.

It's stable.

It's easily scalable.

Technical support is always helpful.

Setup was easy.

The cost is very low. The cost is something like $0.01 to $0.50 per gig.

It's pay per use. We have a yearly license.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

For those who want to use this solution, my advice is to know how to use the services and make a proof of concept for the requirements. If all goes well, then go to production.

We are creating VMs for some of our development testing, and we are using Azure Block Storage in that context. We are not using anything from Azure for production systems. We are just using it for staging and development.

Azure Block Storage is

• easy to deploy
• easy to scale up
• pay-as-you-go. 

So whenever we need something, we use it.

One of the biggest challenges on Azure infrastructure is that sometimes we don't get what we want. Either we have to wait for it or contact support because something is not working for us. Most of the time it works fine. But sometimes, when we want something critical, apart from block storage — we want to increase the capacity of the VM or we want to increase the cores of the VM — we have to wait. We get a response from Microsoft from a North American location. We want to host everything within the UAE. But we are redirected through North America or Europe. That is a challenge with Azure. It's the system availability that is the difficult point.

Also, billing is an issue. We have had a lot of problems when it comes to billing. We started working with minimal resources and we opted for pay-as-you-go mode. Microsoft needs to invest in some resources to improve the billing part. It's not about the money, but the visibility. I see a lot of invoices, but I don't see whether we have paid them or not. And if we have paid, I don't see when it was paid and through which credit card or account we paid. I see invoices, but I don't see the information related to those invoices.

I have been using Azure Block Storage for less than a year.

Availability is sometimes an issue.

Technical support, overall, is good. The response is very good. We don't have any issue with that.

We have our own data center and we use its storage system. But we want to upgrade that because it's not fulfilling our current requirements and we don't see it fulfilling our future requirements either. We have a need to upgrade our system.

Initially, we had some issues but we were not trained. We were used to the legacy environment, so we had challenges. But anyone who has technical knowledge will be able to set it up and understand it, once they start reading about how to set it up and how to use it. 

There are a few challenges, especially when we are setting up block storage or setting up the network. There are complexities of the network environment, such as creating the virtual networks, etc. It's complex.

We started looking at Dell EMC and some other solutions such as QNAP. We are evaluating them.

We have our own team to maintain it. We are still trying to add more resources to the team and trying to find someone who Azure will certify.

I would recommend Azure Block Storage so far, per my current usage, but I would also highly recommend learning how it works and how to configure it properly. Block Storage, in particular, is a bit confusing. People who do not have proper knowledge should not try R&D with it. I would highly recommend getting professional support if you really want to use it. The solution is very good, but the configuration and initial implementation should be done by professionals.