Alice Chambers |
Fujifilm Software has migrated its on-premises virtual machines for photo imaging to Microsoft Azure as part of a large-scale system upgrade.
The company initially used a hybrid approach to migration by keeping network-attached storage (NAS) on premises in 2019 but moved these to Azure and adopted Azure NetApp Files in 2023. Over the past five years, the transition has reduced Fujifilm’s total cost of ownership by 55 per cent.
“We had about 200 terabytes of files on premises,” says Nobukazu Fujimura, research manager of the network solution group software development division at Fujifilm Software, in a recent Microsoft customer story. “When we started the proof of concept, we expected to have about 70 terabytes of files to migrate. By having our business units take an inventory, we cut that amount to 15 terabytes. It’s difficult to have a proper awareness of costs in an on-premises environment, and we realised we were storing a lot of unnecessary data.”
Fujifilm are also saving money by using Azure Files alongside Azure NetApp Files.
“Fujifilm Software stores archived data and other infrequently accessed items on Azure Files, which has lower performance settings and costs. At the time of migration, the company stored around 10 TB of files on Azure NetApp Files and 5 TB of files stored in Azure Files.”
Fujifilm Software’s current system configuration following migration to Azure (image credit: Microsoft)
Moving file storage to Azure is also providing operational benefits.
“For our on-premises system, we used Nagios and dedicated scale-out NAS management tools to monitor storage,” says Fujimura. “But now we can centrally manage Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files with Azure Monitor, just like our previously lifted virtual servers. We no longer need to use multiple tools.”