Azure NetApp files | Azure Files/ Premium Files |
Fully managed, Highly performing enterprise class File Storage Service and easy to integrate with Modern applications like analytics,HPC,AI/ML, VDI and mission critical application workloads | Fully managed File shares Only |
Provides both NFS and SMB . NFS versions supportedNFs3,NFSv4, NFSv4.1. SMB versions supported v2.1, v3.0 and v3.1.1. | Primarily SMB, supports SMB 3.0 and above. Supports 2.1 but with lot of restrictions in terms of mounting and encryption of data. |
Can be natively mounted to Linux machines | Linux distributions need to have SMB kernel client |
SLA based tiering in terms of performance – Tiers are Standard, Premium and extreme | Tiering is storage media based with tier of Premium and standard. |
Movement across ANF tiers can be done using Cloudsync. On the fly data in place tier changing in the Roadmap | Changing of tiers requires data to be migrated to the new tier using Data migration tools |
Minimum deployment is 4TB and max is 100TB max ANF capacity is limited by Storage Account limitation of 500TB. | Minimum deployment min 100GB and maximum 100TB. For Standard files max is 5TB only |
Max file size is 16TB | Max File Size is 1TB only |
Performance depends on the selected SLA tier. | Max iops per share is 100K only. |
Sub-quotas can be set. | No quota management, basically works and provisioned capacity level |
Snapshots are highly space efficient , included in the price of ANF. Upto 256 snapshots per volume(Snap.0 to snap.255) | Snapshots are charged separately and are not space efficient. Snapshot charges $0.22 and $.0075 per used GB/month for Premium and Standard respectively |
Data can be replicated using cross region replication ( azure marketing name for Snapmirror replication) | No Data replication options |
CloudSync can be used in case of NAS or File server as the Source. Very fast and very cost effective and schedule based or one time run options available. CloudSync is free of Cost with ANF | Data Migration to Azure premium Files/files require a combination of Migration tools Filesync+AzureDatabox+Robocopy for Windows file server source and Robocopy only for NAS source. Robocopy inherently slow and manual monitoring is required. |
Consistent sub milli sec latency | No latency consistency |
Restoration can be easily done through snapshots. NetApp is a pioneer with snapshot technology and proven industry acceptance for more than 25 years. | No protection against accidental deletion ( Soft delete is in Preview as we speak and is not a mature technology in Azure) |
Instant R/w Cloning with zero space occupancy until a unique write is made. Extremely useful in a devops and test dev environments. | No Cloning Capability.Snapshots are the only option available, however they are read only |
Compliance and reporting included with ANF. Automated data privacy controls for GDPR, CCPA and many more. Free for ANF | Very good compliance template available. However reporting is not robust. |