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

Good day Of us!

When you have ever been requested to maneuver all our file shares to the cloud ASAP.  You already know that storage migration is a type 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 group) walked via a guided roadmap for locating, assessing, and shifting large-scale storage to Azure with out the homegrown scripts and the late-night reruns.

📺 Watch the session:

Briefly, this session issues as a result of knowledge migration is constantly underestimated. Anusha put it effectively: prospects concentrate on migrating functions and workloads, and the large chunk of storage these apps depend upon tends to be an afterthought. That afterthought is the place initiatives go sideways. Flawed goal tier, incorrect instrument, incorrect sizing, and all of a sudden you might be 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 out there 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 choice (Azure Knowledge Field) for when your community is the bottleneck and you might be staring down a whole lot of terabytes.
• A accomplice program (the Storage Migration Program) that covers the sting circumstances first-party instruments don’t but cowl, with the ISV software program value picked up by Azure.

For those who 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’ve on premises, assess how it’s used, choose the suitable 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 a lot of the heavy lifting:

• Azure Migrate file share evaluation (usually out there). Azure Migrate has been Microsoft’s first-party migration platform for some time, however till not too long ago 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 venture routinely.
• Azure Storage Mover. That is the totally managed on-line migration service. It strikes recordsdata and folders to Azure with out customized scripts or migration infrastructure that you need 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 in the present day (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 embrace 7 TB disks, 120 TB gadgets, and 525 TB gadgets, 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 venture, and also you see file shares seem as first-class entities within the Infrastructure tab proper alongside servers. From there you may tag shares, scope them into teams, and generate assessments that map every share to a beneficial Azure Information SKU, provide you with a TCO estimate, floor readiness blockers, and advocate a migration instrument. You possibly can export the entire thing to Excel or PowerPoint, which is strictly what you want when finance asks for the enterprise case.

For Storage Mover, the important thing architectural element is that the info 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 info 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 via the service itself. Which means 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 via the Azure portal, obtain it, copy domestically over your LAN at LAN speeds, ship it again, and Azure ingests the info into the storage account you specified. The Knowledge Field household is documented on the Microsoft Be taught hyperlink within the Sources part under.

The place does this really repay? A number of situations got here up within the session.

• Carry-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 throughout 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 venture, a job definition, and begin the job. It’s portal-driven from starting to finish.
• Petabyte-scale offline raise. Whenever 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, every 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 constantly on premises and also you need predictable, throttled transfers.
• Sovereign cloud. Storage Mover is now out there in Azure US Authorities, so federal and public sector prospects 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 reside Q&A shouldn’t be 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 value is roofed by Azure.

The sincere tradeoff: Storage Mover assumes an affordable community connection between the agent and the goal. If the pipe is tiny and the dataset is large, the mathematics doesn’t work and you have to be ordering Knowledge Field {hardware}. The session was clear about this, and that form of “use the suitable instrument” steerage is strictly what saves initiatives.

In case you are kicking off a storage migration, right here is the sensible sequence.

1. Rise up (or replace) an Azure Migrate venture and deploy the Migrate equipment on premises. If you have already got one, simply replace to the newest model so file share discovery lights up routinely.
2. Let discovery run, then create an Azure Information evaluation scoped to the shares you care about. Decide your area, redundancy, efficiency look-back window, and percentile utilization. Export the outcomes to Excel or PowerPoint and use it to construct your online business case.
3. Determine on-line vs offline based mostly in your dataset dimension and out there 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 venture 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 accomplice.

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

Cheers!

Pierre Roman