Merge pull request #310243 from roygara/esanrefreshp1

Esan article refresh phase 1

Author: denrea

articles/storage/elastic-san/elastic-san-aks-options.md

@@ -4,23 +4,23 @@ description: Learn about the deployment options you have for using Azure Elastic
 author: roygara
 ms.service: azure-elastic-san-storage
 ms.topic: concept-article
-ms.date: 05/31/2024
+ms.date: 01/08/2026
 ms.author: rogarana
 # Customer intent: As a Kubernetes administrator, I want to choose between Azure Container Storage and the iSCSI CSI driver for deploying Azure Elastic SAN with AKS, so that I can optimize storage management based on my workload requirements and support options.
 ---
 
 
 # Overview - Options for using Azure Elastic SAN with Azure Kubernetes Service
 
-There are two ways to use an Azure Elastic SAN as the backing storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You can either use [Azure Container Storage](../container-storage/container-storage-introduction.md#why-azure-container-storage-is-useful) Preview, or use the open source Kubernetes iSCSI CSI driver.
+Azure Elastic SAN provides backing storage for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) through two deployment options. You can either use [Azure Container Storage](../container-storage/container-storage-introduction.md#why-azure-container-storage-is-useful) Preview, or use the open source Kubernetes iSCSI CSI driver. This article covers the high level differences to help you select the right approach.
 
 ## Kubernetes iSCSI CSI driver
 
-If you use the [Kubernetes iSCSI CSI driver](elastic-san-connect-aks.md), you can connect an existing AKS cluster to Elastic SAN over iSCSI. Since you're manually managing this Elastic SAN, it can also be used for other workloads alongside AKS. However, if you use this configuration, Microsoft won't provide support for any issues stemming from the driver itself, since it's open source. Dynamic provisioning isn't currently supported with this configuration, and only `ReadwriteOnce` access mode is supported.
+If you use the [Kubernetes iSCSI CSI driver](elastic-san-connect-aks.md), you can connect an existing AKS cluster to Elastic SAN over iSCSI. Since you're manually managing this Elastic SAN, you can also use it for other workloads alongside AKS. However, if you use this configuration, Microsoft doesn't provide support for any issues stemming from the driver itself, since it's open source. Dynamic provisioning isn't currently supported with this configuration, and only `ReadwriteOnce` access mode is supported.
 
 ## Azure Container Storage Preview
 
-Azure Container Storage Preview is a cloud-based volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. For new or existing AKS clusters, you can install Azure Container Storage as an extension. After it's installed as an extension, you can programmatically manage and deploy storage, including Elastic SANs, through the Kubernetes control plane. In this case, Azure Container Storage deploys a SAN exclusively for use with your AKS cluster. That SAN can't be used for any other workloads and volume snapshots of that SAN's volumes isn't currently supported with this configuration.
+Azure Container Storage Preview is a cloud-based volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. For new or existing AKS clusters, you can install Azure Container Storage as an extension. After you install it as an extension, you can programmatically manage and deploy storage, including Elastic SANs, through the Kubernetes control plane. In this case, Azure Container Storage deploys a SAN exclusively for use with your AKS cluster. You can't use that SAN for any other workloads and volume snapshots of that SAN's volumes isn't currently supported with this configuration.
 
 ## Next steps
 

articles/storage/elastic-san/elastic-san-introduction.md

@@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
 ---
 title: Introduction to Azure Elastic SAN
-description: An overview of Azure Elastic SAN, a service that enables you to create a virtual SAN to act as the storage for multiple compute options.
+description: Learn how Azure Elastic SAN simplifies storage management for multiple compute resources with high performance and cost optimization.
 author: roygara
 ms.service: azure-elastic-san-storage
 ms.topic: overview
-ms.date: 05/31/2024
+ms.date: 01/07/2026
 ms.author: rogarana
 ms.custom:
   - ignite-2023-elastic-SAN
@@ -13,9 +13,9 @@ ms.custom:
 
 # What is Azure Elastic SAN?
 
-Azure Elastic SAN is Microsoft's answer to the problem of workload optimization and integration between your large scale databases and performance-intensive mission-critical applications. Elastic SAN is a fully integrated solution that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a storage area network (SAN), while also offering built-in cloud capabilities like high availability.
+Azure Elastic SAN helps you optimize workloads and integrate your large-scale databases with performance-intensive, mission-critical applications. Elastic SAN is a fully integrated solution that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a storage area network (SAN). It also offers built-in cloud capabilities like high availability.
 
-Elastic SAN is interoperable with multiple types of compute resources such as Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Instead of having to deploy and manage individual storage options for each individual compute deployment, you can provision an Elastic SAN and use the SAN volumes as backend storage for all your workloads. Consolidating your storage like this can be more cost effective if you have a sizeable amount of large scale IO-intensive workloads and top tier databases.
+Elastic SAN works with many types of compute resources, such as Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Instead of deploying and managing individual storage options for each compute deployment, you can provision an Elastic SAN and use the SAN volumes as backend storage for all your workloads. Consolidating your storage like this can be more cost effective if you have a large number of scale IO-intensive workloads and top-tier databases.
 
 ## Benefits of Elastic SAN
 
@@ -25,45 +25,45 @@ Azure Elastic SAN volumes can connect to a wide variety of compute resources usi
 
 ### Simplified provisioning and management
 
-Elastic SAN simplifies deploying and managing storage at scale through grouping and policy enforcement. With [volume groups](#volume-groups) you can manage a large number of volumes from a single resource. For instance, you can create virtual network rules on the volume group and grant access to all your volumes.
+Elastic SAN simplifies deploying and managing storage at scale through grouping and policy enforcement. By using [volume groups](#volume-groups), you can manage a large number of volumes from a single resource. For example, you can create virtual network rules on the volume group and grant access to all your volumes.
 
 ### Performance
 
-With an Elastic SAN, it's possible to scale your performance up to millions of IOPS, with double-digit GB/s throughput, and have single-digit millisecond latency. The performance of a SAN is shared across all of its volumes. As long as the SAN's caps aren't exceeded and the volumes are large enough, each volume can scale up to 80,000 IOPs. Elastic SAN volumes connect to your clients using the [iSCSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI) protocol, which allows them to bypass the IOPS limit of an Azure VM and offers high throughput limits.
+With an Elastic SAN, you can scale your performance up to millions of IOPS, with double-digit GB/s throughput, and have single-digit millisecond latency. The performance of a SAN is shared across all of its volumes. As long as the SAN's caps aren't exceeded and the volumes are large enough, each volume can scale up to 80,000 IOPS. Elastic SAN volumes connect to your clients by using the [iSCSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI) protocol, allowing the clients to bypass the IOPS limit of an Azure VM and benefit from high throughput limits.
 
 ### Cost optimization and consolidation
 
-Cost optimization can be achieved with Elastic SAN since you can increase your SAN storage in bulk. You can either increase your performance along with the storage capacity, or increase the storage capacity without increasing the SAN's performance, potentially offering a lower total cost of ownership. With Elastic SAN, you generally won't need to overprovision volumes, because you share the performance of the SAN with all its volumes.
+You can optimize costs by increasing your SAN storage in bulk. You can either increase your performance along with the storage capacity, or increase the storage capacity without increasing the SAN's performance, potentially offering a lower total cost of ownership. With Elastic SAN, you generally don't need to overprovision volumes, because you share the performance of the SAN with all its volumes.
 
 ## Elastic SAN resources
 
-Each Azure Elastic SAN has two internal resources: Volume groups and volumes.
+Each Azure Elastic SAN has two internal resources: volume groups and volumes.
 
 The following diagram illustrates the relationship and mapping of an Azure Elastic SAN's resources to the resources of an on-premises SAN:
 
 :::image type="content" source="media/elastic-san-introduction/elastic-san-resource-relationship-diagram.png" alt-text="The Elastic SAN is like an on-premises SAN appliance and is where billing and provisioning are handled, volume groups are like network endpoints and handles access and management, volumes are the storage, same as volumes in an on-premises SAN.":::
 
 ### Elastic SAN
 
-When you configure an Elastic SAN, you select the redundancy of the entire SAN and provision storage. The storage you provision determines how much performance your SAN has, and the total capacity that can be distributed to each volume within the SAN.
+When you configure an Elastic SAN, you select the redundancy of the entire SAN and provision storage. The storage you provision determines how much performance your SAN has, and the total capacity that you can distribute to each volume within the SAN.
 
 Your Elastic SAN's name has some requirements. The name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, and must begin and end with a letter or a number. Each hyphen and underscore must be preceded and followed by an alphanumeric character. The name must be between 3 and 24 characters long.
 
 ### Volume groups 
 
 Volume groups are management constructs that you use to manage volumes at scale. Any settings or configurations applied to a volume group, such as virtual network rules, are inherited by any volumes associated with that volume group.
 
-Your volume group's name has some requirements. The name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, and must begin and end with a letter or a number. Each hyphen must be preceded and followed by an alphanumeric character. The name must be between 3 and 63 characters long.
+Your volume group's name has some requirements. The name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, and must begin and end with a letter or a number. Each hyphen must be preceded and followed by an alphanumeric character. The name must be between 3 and 63 characters long.
 
 ### Volumes
 
-You partition the SAN's storage capacity into individual volumes. These individual volumes can be mounted to your clients with iSCSI.
+You partition the SAN's storage capacity into individual volumes. You can mount these individual volumes to your clients by using iSCSI.
 
-The name of your volume is part of their iSCSI IQN. The name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, and must begin and end with a letter or a number. Each hyphen and underscore must be preceded and followed by an alphanumeric character. The name must also be between 3 and 63 characters long.
+The name of your volume is part of their iSCSI IQN. The name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, and must begin and end with a letter or a number. Each hyphen and underscore must be preceded and followed by an alphanumeric character. The name must be between 3 and 63 characters long.
 
 ## Support for Azure Storage features
 
-The following table indicates support for Azure Storage features with Azure Elastic SAN.
+The following table shows support for Azure Storage features with Azure Elastic SAN.
 
 The status of items in this table might change over time.
 

articles/storage/elastic-san/elastic-san-metrics.md

@@ -4,14 +4,14 @@ description: Learn about the available metrics that can let you understand how y
 author: roygara
 ms.service: azure-elastic-san-storage
 ms.topic: concept-article
-ms.date: 07/14/2025
+ms.date: 01/07/2026
 ms.author: rogarana
 # Customer intent: As a cloud storage administrator, I want to monitor the performance metrics of my Azure Elastic SAN, so that I can optimize its availability and manage resource usage effectively.
 ---
 
 # Elastic SAN metrics
 
-Azure offers metrics in the Azure portal that provide insight into your Elastic SAN resources. This article provides definitions of the specific metrics you can select to monitor. 
+Azure provides metrics in the Azure portal that give you insight into your Elastic SAN resources. This article provides definitions of specific metrics you can select to monitor. 
 
 ## Metrics definitions 
 The following metrics are currently available for your Elastic SAN resource. You can configure and view them in the Azure portal: 
@@ -31,9 +31,9 @@ By default, all metrics are shown at the SAN level. To view these metrics at eit
 
 You can configure the [diagnostic settings](/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/diagnostic-settings) of your elastic SAN to send Azure platform logs and metrics to different destinations. Currently, there's one log configuration:
 
-- Transactions - Every transaction log offered by the resource.
+- Transactions - Every transaction log that the resource offers.
 
-Audit logs are an attempt by each resource provider to provide the most relevant audit data, but might not be considered sufficient from an auditing standards perspective.
+Audit logs are each resource provider's attempt to provide the most relevant audit data. However, these logs might not be considered sufficient from an auditing standards perspective.
 
 Available log categories:
 
@@ -47,10 +47,10 @@ Available log categories:
 ## Monitor workload performance
 
 ### Monitor Availability 
-The **Availability** metric can be useful to view any visible issues from either an application or user perspective.
+The **Availability** metric can be useful for viewing any visible problems from either an application or user perspective.
 
-When using this metric with Azure Elastic SAN, we recommend using the **Average** aggregation - using Average shows you what percentage of your requests are experiencing errors, and if they are within [Elastic SAN's SLA](https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-for-Online-Services?lang=1).
-You can use the **Min** and **Max** aggregation for worst and best case availability scenarios. For instance - **Min** availability can be used for incident alerting.
+When you use this metric with Azure Elastic SAN, you should use the **Average** aggregation. By using Average, you see what percentage of your requests are experiencing errors and if they're within [Elastic SAN's SLA](https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-for-Online-Services?lang=1).
+For worst and best case availability scenarios, you should use the **Min** and **Max** aggregation. For example, you can use **Min** availability for incident alerting.
 
 ### How to create an alert for Availability < 99.9%
 
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ You can use the **Min** and **Max** aggregation for worst and best case availabi
 
 1. In the **Condition** tab, select the **Availability** metric.
 
-1. In the **Alert logic** tab, select the following attribute variable values from the drop down menu: 
+1. In the **Alert logic** tab, select the following attribute variable values from the drop-down menu: 
 
    | Field             | Description  |
    |------------------|--------------|
@@ -70,27 +70,27 @@ You can use the **Min** and **Max** aggregation for worst and best case availabi
    | Threshold value   | 99.9         |
 
 
-1. In the **When to evaluate** tab, select the following variable values from the drop down menu:
+1. In the **When to evaluate** tab, select the following variable values from the drop-down menu:
 
    | Field             | Description  |
    |------------------|--------------|
    | Check every      | 5 minutes    |
    | Lookback period  | 1 hour       |
 
-1. Click **Next** to go to the **Actions** tab and add an action group (email, SMS, etc.) to the alert. You can select an existing action group or create a new action group.
+1. Select **Next** to go to the **Actions** tab and add an action group (email, SMS, and so on) to the alert. You can select an existing action group or create a new action group.
 
-1. Click **Next** to go to the **Details** tab and fill in the details of the alert such as the alert name, description, and severity.
+1. Select **Next** to go to the **Details** tab and fill in the details of the alert such as the alert name, description, and severity.
 
 1. Select **Review + create** to create the alert.
 
 
-### Monitor Utilization
+### Monitor utilization
 
 Utilization metrics that measure the amount of data being transmitted (throughput) or operations being serviced (IOPS) are commonly used to determine how much work is being performed by the application or workload. Transaction metrics can determine the number of operations or requests against the Azure Elastic SAN service over various time granularity.
 
 To determine the average I/O per second (IOPS) for your workload, first determine the total number of transactions using the **Transactions** metric over a minute and then divide that number by 60 seconds. For example, 120,000 transactions in 1 minute / 60 seconds = 2,000 average IOPS.
 
-To determine the average throughput for your workload, take the total amount of transmitted data by combining the **Ingress** and **Egress** metrics (total throughput) and divide that by 60 seconds. For example, 1 GiB total throughput over 1 minute / 60 seconds = 17 MiB average throughput.
+To determine the average throughput for your workload, take the total amount of transmitted data by combining the **Ingress** and **Egress** metrics (total throughput) and divide that number by 60 seconds. For example, 1 GiB total throughput over 1 minute / 60 seconds = 17 MiB average throughput.
 
 ## Next steps