Optimizing Azure Storage with Fabrics
- Mark Thompson
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Overview
Microsoft Azure Storage is a cloud-native solution designed for modern data scenarios. It provides highly available, massively scalable, durable, and secure storage for a wide range of object types. The platform includes several services, which fall into two billing models: usage-based and provisioned-capacity-based.
Billed Based on Actual Usage
Azure Blobs – Massively scalable object storage for text and binary data, with integrated support for analytics via Data Lake Storage.
Azure Elastic SAN – Fully managed SAN solution for simplified deployment, scaling, and management in Azure.
Azure Queues – Reliable message queueing for distributed applications.
Azure Tables – NoSQL store for schemaless, structured data.
Azure Container Storage – Native volume management and orchestration for containers.
Billed Based on Provisioned Capacity
Azure Managed Disks – Block-level storage volumes for Azure virtual machines.
Azure Files – Managed file shares for both cloud and hybrid deployments.
Where Fabrics Delivers Value
Fabrics is a cloud infrastructure management and cost optimization platform that uses AI, machine learning, and automation to address the fundamental inefficiency of provisioned storage in Azure.
Services like Azure Files and Azure Managed Disks do not scale dynamically with demand. Instead, organizations must provision enough capacity in advance to avoid performance bottlenecks. This leads to two persistent challenges:
Overprovisioning – Paying for unused capacity to prevent outages.
Operational Burden – Relying on alerts and manual interventions to resize storage accounts.
Fabrics eliminates these challenges by dynamically managing provisioned storage in real time. The result: no more wasted spend, no more delayed manual adjustments, and no risk of missed alerts.
Azure Files: How Fabrics Helps
Azure Files is offered in two tiers:
Standard (GPv2) Storage – Four operating tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) optimized for different workloads.
Premium Storage – Low-latency, high-transaction storage for performance-sensitive applications.
Fabrics enhances Azure Files by:
Dynamic Quota Management – Administrators set a “safe free space” threshold, and Fabrics automatically adjusts storage up or down to stay within those guardrails.
Tier Optimization – Fabrics tracks usage patterns (e.g., read, write, indexing, retrieval) and automatically places workloads in the most cost-effective operating tier. This ensures you always pay for the right tier, not the wrong one.
Azure Managed Disks: How Fabrics Helps
An Azure Managed Disk functions like a virtual hard disk (VHD). Scaling storage requires two coordinated actions:
Increase the provisioned size of the disk in Azure.
Expand the volume inside the VM’s operating system using disk management tools.
Normally, this is a manual, multi-step process. Fabrics automates it end-to-end:
Continuous Monitoring – Tracks available disk space.
Automated Expansion – Performs both the Azure provisioning step and the OS-level volume expansion automatically, with no engineer involvement.
Conclusion
Azure Storage is a powerful platform, but not all services are built to scale dynamically. Fabrics bridges this gap by applying intelligent automation to Azure Files and Managed Disks - two services that traditionally force IT teams to overprovision.
With Fabrics, organizations gain:
Real-time scaling of provisioned storage.
Automatic tier optimization for Azure Files.
End-to-end disk expansion for Managed Disks.
Lower costs, fewer manual interventions, and reduced operational risk.
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