Microsoft Azure Block Storage Reviews

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.

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.

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 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.

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 have a few clients that use the solution. 

The use cases have been huge. One of the applications we are developing is an internal tax system. We tend to get a lot of client files through different channels and store them in the Block Storage. It's standing on a huge system. It's a multi-cluster, multi-AG kind of informer.

The features are pretty good. Our company mostly uses Java and Microsoft technology. We get good metadata and can save different metadata within the solution.  

It can scale. It's at 99.99%. We can always use a different life cycle on objects so that means we don't want to store the object. On one side probably we can do cold storage and kind of thing. 

Basically, there are a lot of features that are provided and we have a lot of options.

The solution is stable. 

We found the initial setup to be straightforward. 

The solution could use a couple of security features. They still have a lot of other features and everything is coming along quite nicely now, however, I would expect more features in the near future. We'd like more policies and authentication.

We've used the solution for about five years or so.

The solution definitely offers durability, and, stability-wise, we have no complaints. AWe tend to make a backup since it is working on the cluster side, so we do a backup every day. We are also able to access it at a global level.

Speed-wise, I don't see any latency issues.

The solution can scale quite well.

We have 100 clients using the solution. We have a big team in general. 

We have a relationship with and are directly partnered with Microsoft. That means we have our own technical support directly from Microsoft. They are our dedicated architects. We have a data communication channel open, so we can talk to them anytime about anything. We're quite happy with the arrangement.

We have a lot of internal products. The development team has been using Azure Storage and Block Storage and Databricks and other products from Azure.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's not overly difficult or too complex. 

The solution is pay-as-you-go. We don't have any subscriptions; it is more like an on-demand arrangement.

Our company has ties with Microsoft. We kind of partner with Microsoft so we always attempt to propose Azure Solutions, especially in the cloud.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure Block Storage to store, upload and download data. We can also use it as a backup. 

Microsoft Azure Block Storage's stability needs improvement. 

I have been working with the tool for three to four months. 

I would rate Microsoft Azure Block Storage's stability an eight out of ten. 

Microsoft Azure Block Storage's setup is straightforward. You need to create a storage account and give a unique name to it. We have deployed the solution on the cloud. 

I use Microsoft Azure Block Storage's free version. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use Azure Block Storage in two different use cases. In one case, we use it as a staging layer where the files are dumped. Then, within the release, we create and curate layers in different containers, where one container has the raw data and another standard container has the transformation-level data. The next layer is the curated layer, which we use in the views to expose the data to downstream systems like PowerBI or Tableau.

RBAC, access control, soft delete, hard delete, and cool and hot storage tiers are some of the features I have found valuable in Azure Block storage. Basically, if the file is greater than six months, it will get deleted automatically, regardless of whether it's present or not. These features have indirectly helped us to save on storage costs.

The feature that requires improvement is the hierarchical naming step. Enabling this step could provide access to certain features that are currently missing.

Another area for improvement in Microsoft Azure Block Storage is the cache feature. So whenever we upload a file to block storage and then download it to check whether it was uploaded successfully or not, it downloads the older file due to caching. But when we directly download the file without clicking on the preview options, it shows the correct file. The cache issue needs to be addressed to ensure that the correct file is downloaded, especially when it's done manually into the local storage. Because I have checked in other services as well, and the issue only arises when we download it manually into the local storage.

I've been working with Microsoft Azure Block Storage for three years now.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten because downtime is very rare, and the backup and redundancy features are strong. So its stability is very fine.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We have 150+ users because we have RBAC, and I can only see my teammates. But I can see 50+ and could be more.

It's not just one team, but multiple teams across five to six blocks who use it according to their process.

It was mostly handled by our company's Microsoft gold partner, who received seamless support from Microsoft whenever we needed help with any settings that our team couldn't figure out. I'm not sure about other organizations, but since we were a gold partner, support was always available to us.

I found the configuration of Amazon complex compared to Azure, and the cost of Amazon is higher. The documentation is slightly better in Azure. 

The initial setup is easy. There won’t be any hiccups. Even a beginner who is interested in learning the cloud will have any issues setting it up.

I would say the price is low. When I compare it to its competitors like Ebik, Azure's price is lower.

I would give it an eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.