Firstly, what is Azure Storage Mover?
Azure Storage Mover is a new, fully managed migration service that enables customers to migrate their files and folders to Azure Storage while minimising downtime for your workloads.
The most likely usage of Azure Storage Mover is to “Lift and Shift” files and folders from on-premises to Azure, this can be either from an NFS (Network File System) share on a NAS(Network Attached Storage) device or a server within the customers network to an Azure blob container.
It also helps maintain oversight and manage the migration of all the customers distributed file shares via a single storage mover resource.
So what is an NFS Share used for?
It is used for users to store files to be viewed, updated or shared on a remote computer, but act as though it was a local computer.
What is a NAS device?
A NAS device is a data storage device that connects to and is accessed via a network, instead of directly to a computer and is usually used for medium to large companies who want to store large amounts of data that can be accessed by users fast and securely.
Steps to setup Storage Mover –
Deploy a Storage Mover resource in Azure, usually into its own Resource Group.
Download and Deploy, the Storage Mover agent on a virtualisation host(usually a Windows Hyper-V host), which is what manages the migration of your files and folders and this must be located near your source share that you are looking to move into Azure.
This agent acts as a migration appliance that users interact with and must have internet connectivity.
This appliance must have at least 20Gib of local storage.
Azure Storage Mover became Generally Available (GA) in March 2023, so it is still pretty hot off the press. Tune in to the next blog in this series to learn more on how this works in practice.
