Hybrid Storage Appliances

Azure hybrid storage appliances and services offer tiering and caching of storage between on-premises systems and storage in Azure.

Azure Edge Filer

Azure Edge Filers provide file-system caching and offer fast read access for data-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Based on Avere technology acquired by Microsoft in Jan. 2018, Edge Filers include hardware (FXT) and software (vFXT) products that present on-premises and cloud-hosted storage as if it were traditional network-attached storage (NAS). This allows customers to use cloud-based computing services and capacity regardless of where data is stored. Edge Filers benefit organizations that want to store less frequently accessed data in cloud services like Azure, and it could work especially well for read-heavy, cacheable workloads such as media rendering and other HPC workloads. The product line includes physical and virtual appliances:

FXT Edge Filers are hardware appliances that are deployed close to organizational users and use high-speed memory and solid-state drives (SSDs) to cache active data from on-premises and cloud storage and present the cached data as traditional NAS. However, Microsoft has announced FXT Edge Filer will be retired on Dec. 31, 2026, with no hardware or software support after that date.