Azure NetApp Files being Microsoft’s First party service, based on NetApp’s Industry leading ONTAP storage platform provides all the goodness of Microsoft Azure platform with NetApp’s storage expertise. While there are many compelling use-cases like WVD, File Shares, HPC workloads, Databases like Oracle and SAP HANA where ANF provides a lot of value with it’s high-throughput and low-latency performance numbers, there is additional value associated with Azure NetApp Files, thanks to the time-efficient and space-efficient volume snapshots. ANF snapshots are very different from traditional snapshots, they are light-weight and don’t hurt performance and are near-instantaneous. Restoration of data from ANF volume snapshots is equally efficient. Azure NetApp Snapshots support up-to 255 snapshots per volume. You have 3 options for data restoration from volume snapshots –
- Restore a single file or a folder from the snapshot
- Restore entire volume from the snapshot
- Revert the volume to a state captured in the snapshot
Let’s take a look at how Azure NetApp Files Snapshots work: