Creating Blob Storage Accounts

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Last updated: May 21, 2020

In order to add blob storage disks of any variety to your SoftNAS instance, you will need to create at least one storage account. Creating MSFT or Blob disks require different storage account types. In order to leverage more than the 500 TB per storage account limit, you will need to create several blob storage accounts. When creating your multiple blob storage accounts, you must then decide whether to leverage hot or cold storage. You cannot mix hot and cold storage within a pool, but you can provide more than one pool. In other words, you will need to know what configuration you intend to create, and plan your storage accounts accordingly. One SoftNAS on azure instance can potentially require many storage accounts.

To add a storage account:

  1. Log into the Azure Portal.

  2. Select Storage Accounts. Click Add.



  3. Provide a name for the storage account, select the deployment model, and determine what type of account you wish to create, General Purpose, or Blob storage.




  4. If you select General Purpose, you have the option to select Premium Storage. Blob Storage accounts only provide Standard. Premium Storage accounts are backed by solid state drives and offer consistent, low-latency performance. They can only be used with Azure virtual machine disks, and are best for I/O-intensive applications, like databases. This setting can't be changed after the storage account is created. Note as well that Premium storage comes in set disk sizes - 128 GB, 512 GB, and 1024GB. Determine the best option based on your needs.

  5. For Replication, select Locally-redundant storage. Other options will likely work, but have not been fully tested, and may result in latency issues as data can span multiple locations. 




  6. Finally, if you have more than one subscription, select the correct one. Determine whether to create a new resource group, or add the new account to an existing group. If using an existing group, select from the dropdown, and location will be auto-populated. If creating a new resource group, type the name and select the location. Click Create when your selections have been made. 

You now have a new storage account, whether Blob storage or General Purpose.

For more information on storage for Microsoft Azure, see the following links: