Using Azure File Storage with Enterprise Server for .NET

At the time of writing, Azure File Storage is a Preview product offered by Microsoft . To get access to Azure File Storage functionality go to the Azure preview pages and register.

Azure File Storage allows a storage account to be mounted as a shared drive across the azure worker roles.

When configuring your Azure Storage account details during the configuration process in the administration tool, you can elect to share an area of storage and map a drive letter to it.

In the above example, A shared drive assigned to the drive letter M (1) will be created and mapped to the \test (2).

The file storage drive acts as a local NTFS volume that is mounted on the server’s file system and that is accessible to code running in a role. The data written to the drive is persisted in the storage account. Because data written to the drive is stored the storage account, the data is maintained even if the role instance is recycled. For this reason, File Storage can be used to run an application that needs to use information that will persist between recycles.

In the Enterprise Server for .NET context, a File Storage drive provides an alternative deployment to deploying in SQL Azure database instances. The main benefit in using an Azure drive over a database deployment is speed.