These Azure Storage innovations provide engineers with enhanced scalability, performance, and simplified management for AI workloads, from training to inference, enabling more efficient development and deployment of advanced AI solutions.
Microsoft is redefining what’s possible in the public cloud and driving the next wave of AI-powered transformation for organizations. Whether you’re pushing the boundaries with AI, improving the resilience of mission-critical workloads, or modernizing legacy systems with cloud-native solutions, Azure Storage has a solution for you.
At Microsoft Ignite 2025 and KubeCon North America last month, we showcased the latest innovations in Azure Storage, powering your workloads. Here is a recap of those releases and advancements.
Azure Blob Storage provides a unified storage foundation for the entire AI lifecycle, powering everything from ingestion and preparation to checkpoint management and model deployment.
To enable customers to rapidly train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models, we evolved the Azure Blob Storage architecture to scale and deliver exabytes of capacity, 10s of Tbps throughput, and millions of IOPS to GPUs. In this video, you can see a single storage account scaling to over 50 Tbps on read throughput. Azure Blob Storage is also the foundation that enables OpenAI to train and serve models at unprecedented speed and scale.
For customers handling terabyte or petabyte scale AI training data, Azure Managed Lustre (AMLFS) is a high-performance parallel file system delivering massive throughput and parallel I/O to keep GPUs continuously fed with data. AMLFS 20 (preview) supports 25 PiB namespaces and up to 512 GBps throughput. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) integration enhances AMLFS scalability by enabling seamless data movement between AMLFS and your exabyte-scale datasets in Azure Blob Storage. Auto-import (preview) allows you to pull only required datasets into AMLFS, and auto-export sends trained models to long-term storage or inferencing.
Rakuten is accelerating the training of Japanese large language models on Microsoft Azure, leveraging Azure Managed Lustre, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service to maximize GPU utilization and simplify scaling.
Natalie Mao, Vice President, Rakuten
Once models are trained and fine-tuned, inferencing takes center stage delivering real-time predictions and insights. Azure Blob Storage provides best-in-class storage for Microsoft AI services, including Microsoft Foundry Agent Knowledge (preview) and AI Search retrieval agents (preview), enabling customers to bring their own storage accounts for full flexibility and control, ensuring that enterprise data remains secure and ready for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Additionally, Premium Blob Storage delivers consistent low-latency and up to 3X faster retrieval performance, critical for RAG agents. For customers that prefer open-source AI frameworks, Azure Storage built LangChain Azure Blob Loader which delivers granular security, memory-efficient loading of millions of objects and up to 5x faster performance compared to prior community implementations.
Azure Storage is evolving to be an integrated, intelligent AI-driven platform simplifying management of exabyte-scale AI data. Storage Discovery and Copilot work together to help you analyze and understand how your data estate is evolving over time using dashboards and questions in natural language. With Storage Discovery and Storage Actions, you can optimize costs, protect your data and govern large datasets with hundreds of billions of objects used for training, and fine-tuning.
Modern cloud-native applications demand agility. Two principles consistently stand out: elasticity and flexibility. Your storage should scale seamlessly with dynamic workloads—without operational overhead. The innovations below are designed for the cloud, enabling you to auto-scale, optimize costs intelligently, and deliver the performance needed by modern applications.
Azure Elastic SAN provides cloud-native block storage for scale and tight Kubernetes integration for fast scaling, and multi‑tenancy that optimizes cost. With new auto scaling support, Elastic SAN automatically expands resources as needed, making it easier to manage storage footprints across workloads. Early next year, we’ll extend Kubernetes integration via Azure Container Storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to general availability (GA). These enhancements let you maintain familiar hosting environments while layering in cloud-native capabilities.
Cloud-native agility is also critical for modern applications built on object storage, with the need to optimize costs and performance for dynamic and unpredictable traffic patterns. Smart Tier (preview) on Azure Blob Storage continuously analyzes access patterns, moving data between tiers automatically.
New data starts in the hot tier. After 30 days of inactivity, it moves to cool, and after 90 days, to cold. If an object is accessed again, it’s promoted back to hot which keeps data in the most cost-effective tier automatically. You can optimize costs without sacrificing performance, simplifying data management at scale and keeping your focus on building.
Enterprises today run mission-critical workloads that require block storage and deliver predictable performance and uncompromising business continuity. Azure Ultra Disk is our highest-performance block storage offering, purpose-built for workloads like high-frequency trading, ecommerce platforms, transactional databases, and electronic health record systems that demand exceptional speed, reliability, and scalability.
With Azure Ultra Disk, we can confidently scale our platform globally, knowing that performance and resilience will meet enterprise expectations, that consistency allows our teams to focus on AI innovation and workflow automation rather than infrastructure.
Charles McDaniels, Director of Systems Engineering Management for Global Cloud Services, ServiceNow
We know performance, cost, and business continuity remain the top priorities for our customers and we are raising the bar in every category:
Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is designed to deliver low latency, high performance, and data management at scale. Its large volumes capabilities have been significantly expanded providing an over 3x increase in single volume capacity scale to 7.2 PiB and a 4x increase in throughput to 50 GiBps. Cache volumes bring data and files closer to where users need rapid access in a space efficient footprint. These make ANF suitable for several high-performance computing workloads such as Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Seismic Interpretation and Visualization, Reservoir Simulations, and Risk Modeling. Microsoft is not only positioning ANF for mission critical applications but also using ANF for in-house silicon design.
Every organization’s cloud journey is unique. Whether you need to move existing environments to the cloud with minimal disruption or plan a full modernization, Azure Storage offers solutions for you. Storage Migration Solution Advisor in Copilot can provide recommendations to help streamline the decision-making process for these migrations.
Azure Data Box and Storage Mover simplify the migration journey from on-premises and other clouds to Azure. The next generation Azure Data Box is now GA. Storage Mover is our fully managed data migration service that is secure, efficient and scalable with new capabilities: on-premises NFS shares to Azure Files NFS 4.1, on-premises SMB shares to Azure Blob storage, and cloud-to-cloud transfers. Storage Migration Solution Advisor in Copilot accelerates decision-making for migrations.
For users ready to migrate their NAS data estates, Azure Files now makes this easier than ever. We have introduced a new management model making it easier and more cost effective to use file shares. Additionally, Azure Files now enables you to eliminate complex on-premises Active Directory or domain controller infrastructure, with Entra-only identities for SMB shares. With cloud native identity support, you can now manage your user permissions directly in Azure, including external identities for applications like Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
Entra-only identities support with Azure Files transforms SLB’s Petrel workflows by removing dependencies on on-premises domain controllers, simplifying identity management and storage infrastructure for globally distributed teams working on complex exploration and reservoir characterization. This cloud-native architecture allows customers to access SMB shares in an easy and secure manner without complex VPN or hybrid infrastructure setups.
Swapnil Daga, Storage Architect for Tenant Infrastructure, SLB
ANF Migration Assistant simplifies moving ONTAP workloads from on-premises or other clouds to Azure. Behind the scenes, the Migration Assistant uses NetApp’s SnapMirror replication technology, providing efficient, full fidelity, block-level incremental transfers. You can now leverage large datasets without impacting production workloads.
For customers running on-premises partner solutions who want to migrate to Azure using the same partner-provided technology, Azure has recently introduced Azure Native offers with Pure Storage and Dell PowerScale.
To make migrations easier, Azure Storage’s Migration Program connects you with a robust ecosystem of experts and tools. Trusted partners like Atempo, Cirata, Cirrus Data, and Komprise can accelerate migration of SAN and NAS workloads. This program offers secure, low-risk transfers of files, objects, and block storage to help enterprises unlock the full potential of Azure.
The era of AI-powered transformation is here. Begin your journey by exploring Azure’s advanced storage offerings and migration tools, designed to accelerate AI adoption, cloud migration, and modernization. Take the next step today and unlock new possibilities with Azure Storage as the foundation for your AI initiatives.
For any questions, reach out at azurestoragefeedback@microsoft.com.
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