Microsoft recently announced previews of Azure Storage Mover, a fully managed hybrid migration service.

File storage is an important part of any organization’s on-premises IT infrastructure. As they migrate more and more of their applications and user partitions to the cloud they often face challenges with the process itself in the associated file data. Having the right tools and services in place is essential for a successful migration.

In February 2022, Microsoft launched the Azure File Migration Program, which provides a free service to users through a choice of storage migration partners. The main capabilities of the pre-release version of Azure Storage Mover are:

NFS sharing to an Azure block container
In this preview, we focus on migrating a local Network File System (NFS) share to an Azure blob container. In the coming months, Storage Mover will support many additional source and target combinations.

Cloud managed migrations
Managing large-scale copy jobs without a coordinating service can be time-consuming and error-prone. Individual jobs must be monitored and any errors corrected. It is difficult to maintain comprehensive oversight to ensure a complete and successful migration of your data.

Scale and performance
Many aspects contribute to the high performance of a migration service. Moving data quickly through the Azure Storage REST protocol and clearly separating the management path from the data path are among the most important. Each agent will send your files and folders directly to the target storage in Azure.

Azure Storage Mover is a hybrid service with migration agents that users can deploy near the source storage. All agents can be managed from the same location in Azure, even if they are deployed in different parts of the world. Additionally, with the service, users can express their migration plan in Azure and, when ready, conveniently launch and track migrations directly from the Azure portal, PowerShell or CLI.

Under the hood, Azure Storage Mover is backed by a replication engine and is best suited for fast and accurate migration scenarios. Users could choose it for short-term or occasional uses when they don’t need to synchronize two locations at any given time.