Transferring Petabytes With out the Panic: At-Scale Storage Assessments and Migrations to Azure

Good day Of us!

You probably have ever been requested to maneuver all our file shares to the cloud ASAP.  You already know that storage migration is a kind of initiatives that appears simple on a slide and will get ugly in actuality. On this session on the Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026, Anusha Subramanian and Madhuri Narayana Rao (each Product Managers on the Azure Storage crew) walked by way of a guided roadmap for locating, assessing, and transferring large-scale storage to Azure with out the homegrown scripts and the late-night reruns.

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Briefly, this session issues as a result of knowledge migration is persistently underestimated. Anusha put it nicely: clients concentrate on migrating functions and workloads, and the large chunk of storage these apps rely on tends to be an afterthought. That afterthought is the place initiatives go sideways. Fallacious goal tier, improper software, improper sizing, and abruptly you’re unwinding an structure six months in.

Here’s what you get out of the brand new tooling Anusha and Madhuri lined:

• A primary-party, end-to-end path from discovery to evaluation to cutover, all inside providers you already pay for.
• File share discovery and evaluation now usually obtainable in Azure Migrate, so that you cease guessing about your on-premises property.
• A completely managed on-line migration service (Azure Storage Mover) that handles retries, logging, bandwidth, and scheduling for you.
• An offline possibility (Azure Knowledge Field) for when your community is the bottleneck and you’re staring down tons of of terabytes.
• A companion program (the Storage Migration Program) that covers the sting circumstances first-party instruments don’t but cowl, with the ISV software program price picked up by Azure.

In case you handle file servers, NAS, or massive object shops and you’ve got a migration in your roadmap, that is your toolkit.

The session framed large-scale storage migration as a guided roadmap with clear phases. You uncover what you may have on premises, assess how it’s used, choose the appropriate cloud goal, determine on a migration technique, execute in phases, after which run post-migration checks earlier than you narrow over. The purpose of the brand new tooling is to make every of these steps repeatable as a substitute of bespoke.

Three providers do many of the heavy lifting:

• Azure Migrate file share evaluation (usually obtainable). Azure Migrate has been Microsoft’s first-party migration platform for some time, however till just lately it was very compute-focused (assume VMware, Hyper-V, and bodily server lift-and-shift). The brand new functionality extends that very same discovery equipment to the file shares hosted on these servers. You get share stock, OS sort, protocol, capability, and primary efficiency metrics like IOPS and throughput, all flowing again into your Azure Migrate challenge mechanically.
• Azure Storage Mover. That is the absolutely managed on-line migration service. It strikes recordsdata and folders to Azure with out customized scripts or migration infrastructure that it’s important to babysit. It helps on-premises SMB and NFS sources, cloud-to-cloud strikes inside Azure (for instance, Blob container to Blob container), and AWS S3 to Azure Blob at this time (with extra clouds on the roadmap).
• Azure Knowledge Field. The offline path. Ruggedized, encrypted, shipped to your datacenter, copied domestically, shipped again, and ingested into Azure Storage. The present SKUs embody 7 TB disks, 120 TB units, and 525 TB units, with 256-bit AES encryption finish to finish.

For Azure Migrate file share evaluation, you obtain (or replace) the Migrate equipment and deploy it in your VMware, Hyper-V, or bodily server property. Grant the required permissions, and the equipment begins accumulating share metadata and efficiency telemetry. That knowledge flows again into your Azure Migrate challenge, and also you see file shares seem as first-class entities within the Infrastructure tab proper alongside servers. From there you’ll be able to tag shares, scope them into teams, and generate assessments that map every share to a really useful Azure Information SKU, offer you a TCO estimate, floor readiness blockers, and suggest a migration software. You possibly can export the entire thing to Excel or PowerPoint, which is precisely what you want when finance asks for the enterprise case.

For Storage Mover, the important thing architectural element is that the information path is separate from the administration path. You deploy a Storage Mover agent near your supply (on premises, in one other cloud, or wherever the information lives). The Storage Mover useful resource in Azure can sit in any area. The agent pulls knowledge from SMB or NFS, then pushes it through REST API on to the goal storage account. Solely logs and metadata circulate by way of the service itself. Meaning migration velocity is ruled by the proximity between the agent and the goal storage account, not by the area of the administration useful resource. SMB credentials are saved in Azure Key Vault, the agent fetches them at runtime, and one central Storage Mover useful resource can handle brokers deployed globally.

Knowledge Field is conceptually less complicated. Order the system by way of the Azure portal, obtain it, copy domestically over your LAN at LAN speeds, ship it again, and Azure ingests the information into the storage account you specified. The Knowledge Field household is documented on the Microsoft Be taught hyperlink within the Assets part beneath.

The place does this really repay? Just a few situations got here up within the session.

• Elevate-and-shift of file servers. Uncover with Azure Migrate, assess, get goal SKU suggestions and TCO, then transfer with Storage Mover. Permissions, metadata, and folder construction are preserved through the copy.
• Cloud-to-cloud (AWS S3 to Azure Blob). The session demoed the multi-cloud connector workflow: deploy a Storage Mover useful resource, add an AWS connector with an Stock and Storage Knowledge Administration answer, run the AWS CloudFormation template, then create a challenge, a job definition, and begin the job. It’s portal-driven from starting to finish.
• Petabyte-scale offline raise. If you can not saturate your manufacturing WAN for weeks, Knowledge Field will get your seed knowledge to Azure. Then Storage Mover handles the automated delta sync so the cutover window stays small.
• Recurring incremental sync. Storage Mover now helps recurring schedules (one-time, day by day, weekly, or month-to-month) mixed with bandwidth administration for peak and off-peak home windows. That’s helpful when knowledge is being collected repeatedly on premises and also you need predictable, throttled transfers.
• Sovereign cloud. Storage Mover is now obtainable in Azure US Authorities, so federal and public sector clients can run the identical workflow inside their sovereign atmosphere.
• Specialised situations. For source-target pairs the first-party providers don’t cowl but (say, on-premises NetApp to Azure NetApp Information, which Anusha confirmed within the stay Q&A just isn’t but in Azure Migrate’s scope), the Storage Migration Program brings in companions like Atempo, Knowledge Dynamics, Cirrus Knowledge, and Cirrata. The ISV software program price is roofed by Azure.

The trustworthy tradeoff: Storage Mover assumes an inexpensive community connection between the agent and the goal. If the pipe is tiny and the dataset is large, the maths doesn’t work and you need to be ordering Knowledge Field {hardware}. The session was clear about this, and that form of “use the appropriate software” steering is precisely what saves initiatives.

If you’re kicking off a storage migration, right here is the sensible sequence.

1. Rise up (or replace) an Azure Migrate challenge and deploy the Migrate equipment on premises. If you have already got one, simply replace to the most recent model so file share discovery lights up mechanically.
2. Let discovery run, then create an Azure Information evaluation scoped to the shares you care about. Choose your area, redundancy, efficiency look-back window, and percentile utilization. Export the outcomes to Excel or PowerPoint and use it to construct your small business case.
3. Resolve on-line vs offline based mostly in your dataset dimension and obtainable bandwidth. Most initiatives can use Storage Mover. The most important ones, or those with constrained WAN, begin with Knowledge Field seed knowledge after which incremental sync with Storage Mover.
4. For Storage Mover, create the useful resource, deploy the agent near your knowledge, register it, outline endpoints, create a challenge and job definition, and begin the job. Configure bandwidth schedules so your manufacturing visitors doesn’t endure.
5. For specialised source-target pairs, attain out through the Storage Migration Program contact (azstoragemigration at microsoft.com) and have interaction a listed companion.

Catch the total Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 session playlist right here

Cheers!

Pierre Roman