SPECstorage™ Solution 2020_eda_blended Result: Microsoft and NetApp Inc. - Azure NetApp Files large volume breakthrough mode (Aug 2026)

Microsoft and NetApp Inc.	SPECstorage Solution 2020_eda_blended = 5340 Job_Sets
Azure NetApp Files large volume breakthrough mode (Aug 2026)	Overall Response Time = 0.54 msec

Azure NetApp Files large volume breakthrough mode (Aug 2026)
Tested by	Microsoft and NetApp Inc.
Hardware Available	August 2026
Software Available	May 2026
Date Tested	August 2026
License Number	33
Licensee Locations	San Jose, CA USA

Azure NetApp Files is an Azure native, first-party, enterprise-class, high-performance file storage service. It provides Volumes as a service, which you can create within a NetApp account and a capacity pool, and share to clients using SMB and NFS. You can also select service and performance levels and manage data protection. You can create and manage high-performance, highly available, and scalable file shares by using the same protocols and tools that you're familiar with and rely on on-premises.

Solution Under Test Bill of Materials

Item No	Qty	Type	Vendor	Model/Name	Description
1	1	Storage Service	Microsoft	Azure NetApp Files large volume breakthrough mode	Azure NetApp Files large volumes can support from 50 TiB to 2 PiB in size. Breakthrough mode enables individual volumes to scale beyond 12.5 GiB/s. Volumes can be resized up or down on demand, and throughput can be adjusted automatically (based on volume size) or manually depending on the capacity pool QoS type.
2	48	Azure Virtual Machine	Microsoft	Standard_E8_v5	Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on 48 Azure E8_v5 Virtual Machines (8 vCPU, 64 GiB Memory, 1x Virtual NIC supporting up to 12.5 Gbps egress network bandwidth). Each workload client mounted the Azure NetApp Files large volume once over NFSv3.
3	1	Azure Virtual Machine	Microsoft	Standard_D2s_v5	(Prime Client) Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on an Azure D2s_v5 Virtual Machine (2 vCPU, 8 GiB Memory, 1x Virtual NIC supporting up to 12.5 Gbps egress network bandwidth).

Configuration Diagrams

Component Software

Hardware Configuration and Tuning - Virtual

Software Configuration and Tuning - Virtual

Item No	Component	Type	Name and Version	Description
1	RHEL 9.8	Operating System	RHEL 9.8, kernel 5.14.0-687.41.1.el9_8.x86_64	Operating System (OS) for the workload clients

Clients
Parameter Name	Value	Description
rsize,wsize	262144	NFS mount options for data block size
protocol	tcp	NFS mount options for protocol
vers	3	NFS mount options for NFS version
nconnect	8	NFS mount options for multiple TCP connections
actimeo	600	NFS mount option to modify the timeouts for attribute caching
nocto	present (boolean)	NFS mount option to turn off close-to-open consistency
noatime	present (boolean)	NFS mount option to turn off access time updates
nofile	102400	Maximum number of open files per user
nproc	10240	Maximum number of processes per user
sunrpc.tcp_slot_table_entries	128	Sets the number of (TCP) RPC entries to pre-allocate for in-flight RPC requests
net.core.wmem_max	16777216	Maximum size of the socket send buffer
net.core.rmem_max	16777216	Maximum size of the socket receive buffer
net.core.wmem_default	1048576	Default setting in bytes of the socket send buffer
net.core.rmem_default	1048576	Default setting in bytes of the socket receive buffer
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem	1048576 8388608 33554432	Minimum, default and maximum size of the TCP receive buffer
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem	1048576 8388608 33554432	Minimum, default and maximum size of the TCP send buffer
net.core.optmem_max	4194304	Maximum ancillary buffer size allowed per socket
net.core.somaxconn	65535	Maximum tcp backlog an application can request
net.ipv4.tcp_mem	4096 89600 8388608	Maximum memory in 4096-byte pages across all TCP applications. Contains minimum, pressure and maximum.
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling	1	Enable TCP window scaling
net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps	0	Turn off timestamps to reduce performance spikes related to timestamp generation
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save	1	Prevent TCP from caching connection metrics on closing connections
net.ipv4.route.flush	1	Flush the routing cache
net.ipv4.tcp_low_latency	1	Allows TCP to make decisions to prefer lower latency instead of maximizing network throughput. * See Note below
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range	1024 65000	Defines the local port range that is used by TCP and UDP traffic to choose the local port.
net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle	0	Congestion window will not be timed out after an idle period
net.core.netdev_max_backlog	300000	Sets maximum number of packets, queued on the input side, when the interface receives packets faster than kernel can process
net.ipv4.tcp_sack	0	Disable TCP selective acknowledgements
net.ipv4.tcp_dsack	0	Disable duplicate SACKs
net.ipv4.tcp_fack	0	Disable forward acknowledgement. * See Note below
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs	30000	Defines when dirty data is old enough to be eligible for writeout by the kernel flusher threads. Unit is 100ths of a second.
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs	30000	Defines a time interval between periodic wake-ups of the kernel threads responsible for writing dirty data to hard-disk. Unit is 100ths of a second.

Software Configuration and Tuning Notes

Tuned the necessary client parameters as shown above, for communication between clients and storage over Azure Virtual Networking, to optimize data transfer and minimize overhead. < br /> Note - net.ipv4.tcp_low_latency and net.ipv4.tcp_fack are obsolete in Linux 4.14 and later but were configured during the test.

Service SLA Notes

Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Azure NetApp Files

Storage and Filesystems

Item No	Description	Data Protection	Stable Storage	Qty
1	Azure NetApp Files large volume, Flexible Service Level, 150 TiB, 57,600 provisioned MiB/s	Azure NetApp Files Flexible, Standard, Premium and Ultra service levels are built on a fault-tolerant bare-metal fleet powered by ONTAP, delivering enterprise-grade resilience, and uses RAID-DP (Double Parity RAID) to safeguard data against disk failures. This mechanism distributes parity across multiple disks, enabling seamless data recovery even if two disks fail simultaneously. RAID-DP has a long-standing presence in the enterprise storage industry and is recognized for its proven reliability and fault tolerance.	Stable Storage	1

Number of Filesystems	1
Total Capacity	150 TiB
Filesystem Type	Azure NetApp Files large volume

Filesystem Creation Notes

The large volume was created via the public Azure API using the Azure CLI. Creation commands are available here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/netappfiles/volume?view=azure-cli-latest#az-netappfiles-volume-create
Creating the Azure NetApp Files Account: az netappfiles account create --account-name [account-name] --resource-group [resource-group] --location [location]
Creating the Azure NetApp Files Capacity Pool: az netappfiles pool create --account-name [account-name] --resource-group [resource-group] --location [location] --pool-name [pool-name] --service-level Flexible --size 164926744166400 --CustomThroughputMibps 57600
Creating the Azure NetApp Files Volume: az netappfiles volume create --account-name [account-name] --file-path [mount-point] --name [volume-name] --pool-name [pool-name] --resource-group [resource-group] --location [location] --protocol-types NFSv3 --vnet [vnet-id] --subnet [subnet-id] --zones 1 --service-level Flexible --network-features Standard --is-large-volume true --usage-threshold 153600 --throughput-mibps 57600 --breakthrough-mode Enabled

Storage and Filesystem Notes

The provisioned throughput (57,600 MiB/s) is the volume's configured maximum; actual maximum achievable throughput depends on the workload.

Transport Configuration - Virtual

Item No	Transport Type	Number of Ports Used	Notes
1	Virtual NIC	48	Each of the 48 workload Linux Virtual Machines has a single Network Adapter supporting up to 12.5 Gbps egress network bandwidth with Accelerated Networking enabled.
2	Virtual NIC	1	The Prime client has a single Network Adapter supporting up to 12.5 Gbps egress network bandwidth with Accelerated Networking enabled.

Transport Configuration Notes

Azure Virtual machines bandwidth limits egress (outbound) traffic from each virtual machine up to 12.5 Gbps. The virtual machines ingress bandwidth rates may exceed the documented limit depending on other resources available to the virtual machine (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/virtual-machine-network-throughput)

Switches - Virtual

Processing Elements - Virtual

Memory - Virtual

Stable Storage

Solution Under Test Configuration Notes

Item No	Switch Name	Switch Type	Total Port Count	Used Port Count	Notes
1	Azure Virtual Network - Sweden Central region - AZ1	Virtual Network	55	55	The Azure virtual network had 6 connections for the Azure NetApp Files storage endpoints, 1 connection for the Prime client, and 48 (1 per) RHEL client VMs. Azure virtual networks allow up to 65,536 Network interface cards and Private IP addresses per virtual network.

Item No	Qty	Type	Location	Description	Processing Function
1	384	vCPU	Azure Cloud	Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8573C CPU @ 3.50GHz (8 cores allocated to each of the 48 Workload VMs)	Client Workload Generator
2	2	vCPU	Azure Cloud	Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8370C CPU @ 2.80GHz (2 cores allocated to Prime VM)	Prime Client

Description	Size in GiB	Number of Instances	Nonvolatile	Total GiB
Client Workload Generator	64	48	V	3072
Prime Client	8	1	V	8
Grand Total Memory Gibibytes	3080

Each client was round-robin assigned and mounted NFSv3 to one of six storage endpoints for the Azure NetApp Files large volume. Each storage endpoint has 8 workload VMs connected.
Unlike a general-purpose operating system, Azure NetApp Files does not provide mechanisms for customers to run third-party code (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/benchmark/azure/baselines/azure-netapp-files-security-baseline?toc=/azure/azure-netapp-files/TOC.json#security-profile). Azure Resource Manager allows only an allow-listed set of operations to be executed via the Azure APIs (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-netapp-files/control-plane-security).
Underlying Azure infrastructure was patched for Spectre/Meltdown on or prior to January 2018. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/securing-azure-customers-from-cpu-vulnerability/ and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/mitigate-spectre).

SPECstorage™ Solution 2020_eda_blended Result

Performance

Product and Test Information