Efficient Microsoft Azure Uploads and Downloads

With the release of version 0.7.1, Elasto is now capable of efficient (sparse aware) uploads and downloads to/from Microsoft Azure, using the Blob and File services.

This is done by determining which regions of a Page Blob, File Service file, or local file are allocated and only transferring those regions, which improves both network and storage utilisation.

• For Azure Page Blobs, the Get Page Ranges API request is used to obtain a list of allocated regions.
• For Azure File Service files, the List Ranges API request is used.
• For local files, SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE are used to determine which regions of a file are allocated.
• Amazon S3 Objects and Azure Block Blobs are still downloaded and uploaded in entirety.
• Sparse regions are unsupported by these services.

Elasto is free software, and can be obtained for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions from the openSUSE Build Service. Be safe, take backups before experimenting with this new feature.