Automate File Share and Data Disk Sizes Using Fabrics Cloud Manager
Microsoft Azure enables companies to manage file shares and virtual disks on a whole new playing field. But without new rules for the game on this field, companies get the feature benefits but miss the management time and cost savings!
By moving files shares and virtual machines to Azure, companies can attain the advantages and flexibility of the cloud in their hybrid or cloud environments. File shares can be access through SMB from anywhere. Virtual machines can be provisioned and given data storage drives without any thought to actual hardware. They can then be accessed by virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Persistent virtual machines used as application servers or many other workloads have data disks that grow and shrink over time. File shares are utilized to store transient and long-term files and data that grow and shrink over time.
Historically, file shares have been monitored by RMM tools. These tools, or users themselves create tickets for IT departments or MSPs to add storage space to file shares or disk space on data drives. This “reactive” pattern causes delay and requires IT professional time (unnecessary labor). With virtual machines, mistakes can be made where space is added to the virtual machine in Azure, but the IT professional forgets to allocate the new space within the virtual machine. All tickets take time to process, but headaches are added with frustrated users when mistakes like this occur. Their ticket is closed. But the virtual machine still doesn’t have space.
This “reactive” management style is outdated and unnecessary. IT professionals are highly skilled, highly paid individuals. Tasking them with adding disk space seems on the surface, without any analysis of history, like a large waste of their time and skills.
Fabrics Cloud Manager is a “proactive” tool. It acts as your constant IT professional. The Fabrics Agent will evaluate any file share or data disk every 5 minutes and scale it up or down as needed based on the parameters you set in the Fabrics Cloud Manager portal.
This allows you to free up your IT professional to do high level tasks.
But more importantly, it starts to leverage the power and flexibility of Azure by ONLY allocating the ACTUAL space you need. Each GB costs money so if you can automatically manage ALL your storage to a minimum level of free space then you are only paying for resources that are being consumed – Stop paying for unused resources and let Fabrics Cloud Manager optimize your storage across ALL your file shares and data disks.