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Minimizing Azure Blob Storage Costs: Tips and Tricks

Nov 09 2020
Azure Azure Blobs How To Snapshot / Checkpoint Storage Accounts
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Azure Storage Cost Savings

Maximizing cost savings on Azure Blob Storage and Files has become increasingly important as more businesses migrate their data to the cloud. In this article, we’ll discuss how utilizing Cloud Storage Manager can help you optimize Azure storage consumption and significantly reduce expenses. We’ll also explore various ways to identify and remove redundant data and manage your virtual machine snapshots effectively.

Uncovering Azure Blob Storage Consumption

A Comprehensive Scan with Cloud Storage Manager

By using Cloud Storage Manager, you can perform a full scan of all your Azure Subscriptions and Blob Storage Accounts, providing a clear overview of your Azure Blob Storage usage. This visibility allows you to identify potential areas where you can cut costs and better allocate resources.

Azure Storage Overview

Azure Blob Storage Locations

Not only could they easily see the amount of Azure Blob Storage in use, they could also see all the Microsoft Datacentres where they are using storage from the map tab.

How much blob storage are your VM snapshots consuming?

Azure Blob Storage Reporting

One of the easiest ways to start saving on your Azure Blob Storage is to find often forgotten about Azure Virtual Machine Snapshots. 

Often snapshots are created and then forgotten about. 

Simply go to the Reports Tab in Cloud Storage Manager and run the LIST OF AZURE SNAPSHOTS report. 

From the reports, you can quickly see where you could apply an Azure Storage Lifecycle Management Policy, and move the files that havent been accessed to a lower storage Tier to save you money.

Azure VM Snapshot Storage

Azure Virtual Machine Snapshots: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Once the Azure Snapshot report has been generated, simply open it up in excel to see all your Azure VM snapshots.

The report provides you with information including the name of the Azure snapshot, which subscription it resides in, the Azure Storage Account, the relevant Container, size of the Azure VM snapshot, when it was created, if its a managed or unmanaged disk, the Azure Resource Group, type of snapshot created and finally any Azure Tags if you have them. 

From this report, we found that they had 1168 Azure VM snapshots lingering in their environment, some well over 3 years old.

Using a simple calculation in Excel using standard Azure storage costs, ($0.02750 per TB using azure blob storage pricing provided by Microsoft – IN $AUS. 

Azure Pricing Calculator

Visit the Azure Pricing Calculator for pricing in your currency ) deleting all these snapshots saved the client just under $2,000 per month, an approximate saving of $24,000 a year.

Just running these two simple reports and then taking action on them
saved this client $33,600 in their yearly Azure Blob Storage Costs.

Managing Azure Files Consumption

Gaining Insights with Cloud Storage Manager

As organizations increasingly adopt Azure Files to replace on-premise file servers, it’s crucial to understand exactly how much data resides in your Azure Files.

Cloud Storage Manager can scan all your Azure Files across your tenancy, offering quick and easy insights into Azure Files consumption.

Identifying Cost-Saving Opportunities

With a clear view of your Azure Files consumption, you can identify opportunities to reduce costs by optimizing storage usage and eliminating unnecessary data.

Azure Files Overview

Handling Unattached Azure VM Disks

Finding Unattached Disks with Cloud Storage Manager

Next on the list to reduce their Azure Storage costs, was finding unattached Azure Virtual Machine disks. 

Again, this is often overlooked, to delete any disks no longer needed when decommissioning your Azure VMs.

Another standard report is run, this time All Unattached Disks.

Once the report has completed, again open it up in Microsoft Excel, and you can go through this data to see which Azure VM Unattached Disks can be deleted, further reducing your Azure Storage Costs.

Azure VM Unattached Disk

Azure VM Storage Cost Savings

Now using the same quick costing formulas from before, we can see an estimated monthly Azure Storage cost for these unattached virtual machine disks.

Estimating Savings with the Azure Pricing Calculator

After running this report and using the Azure Cost Estimator (I used AUD pricing here) to get cloud storage pricing, we found that the client had over 110 unattached Azure Virtual Machine Disks. 

Removing all these unattached disks saved them $800 per month, so around $9,600 per year.

Reduce your Microsoft Azure Storage Costs

In a follow-up blog post, we will then dig a little deeper into more Azure Storage cost-saving initiatives (looking to further reduce your Azure Blob and FIles storage pricing and costs) using the insights from Cloud Storage Manager.

 

Download a free trial of Cloud Storage Manager today and start saving money with your Azure Storage.

Azure Cost Optimisation Conclusion

Azure pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model, where customers are only charged for the services and resources they consume. This allows for flexible and cost-effective cloud computing. There are a variety of services available in Azure, including computing, storage, networking, and security. The pricing for these services can vary based on factors such as the type of service, the amount of resources used, and the duration of use.

The Azure pricing calculator is a tool that can be used to estimate the cost of using Azure services. The calculator allows you to select the services you want to use, input the details of your usage, and see an estimated cost. This can help you to budget for your cloud computing needs and make informed decisions about which services to use and how much to use them.

In addition to the pricing calculator, there are also a number of pricing options and discounts available to help you save money on your Azure bill. For example, you can use reserved instances to save up to 72% on virtual machine costs, or you can take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit to use your existing Windows Server licenses in Azure and save up to 40%.

The Cloud Storage Manager is a tool that helps manage and optimize cloud storage costs for organizations using Azure storage. By providing insights into storage usage patterns, the tool helps organizations make informed decisions about storage capacity planning, tiering, and rightsizing, which can result in cost savings. With its easy-to-use interface and intuitive navigation, the Cloud Storage Manager simplifies the process of managing and optimizing cloud storage costs.

In addition to cost savings, the Cloud Storage Manager also offers benefits such as improved visibility into storage usage, with the ability to view storage costs by usage, users can identify and eliminate redundant, underutilized, or unnecessary storage resources.

Overall, the Cloud Storage Manager is a valuable tool for organizations using Azure storage. By helping to optimize cloud storage costs and streamline management of storage resources, the tool enables organizations to focus on delivering value to their customers, rather than managing storage resources.

by Mark

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