Azure Elastic SAN Preview Offers iSCSI-Connected Storage

• Azure Elastic SAN, in preview, provides hosted block storage managed like an on-premises storage area network (SAN) appliance.
• Customers can use it to migrate workloads from on-premises SAN appliances to Azure with minimal redesign.
• Azure customers can leverage cost savings and management benefits by consolidating Azure VM storage into SANs.

Azure Elastic SAN provides managed block storage for Azure VMs using iSCSI volumes that have configurable capacity and performance, and it offers similar storage management and consolidation benefits as a traditional on-premises SAN. Elastic SAN is currently in preview in limited Azure regions, with no timeline for general availability.

Elastic SAN Overview

Compared to other block storage offerings like Azure Disk or Azure Files, Elastic SAN can provide consolidated management and greater capacity and performance. It will especially benefit high-capacity database workloads using products such as SQL Server or PostgreSQL, and simplifies management of large-scale storage deployments by providing a single management point for groups of storage volumes as opposed to managing discrete Azure Disk storage attached to each Azure VM.