Microsoft has recently updated it prices for Azure Archive Storage, cutting the cost of the solution by as much as 50 percent. The company says the reason for the reduction is to create a cost-effective cloud storage experience. To complement the changes, Microsoft has now rolled out a new data redundancy type.
Called Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (GZRS), it is available in preview for Azure Archive Storage customers.
If you’ve never heard of Azure Archive Storage, it hosts redundancy options that users leverage to repair processes when data is corrupted. Among the redundancies are locally redundant storage (LRS), zone-redundant storage (ZRS), and Microsoft says more will be launched eventually.
With GZRS, Microsoft says customers get a well-balanced option that blends availability, performance, and recovery. Users can leverage GZRS to read data even if a whole data region is unavailable. Microsoft also promises the following abilities:
- Synchronously writing three replicas of your data across multiple Azure Availability Zones, such as zone-redundant storage today, protecting from cluster, datacenter, or entire zone failure.
- Asynchronously replicating the data to another region within the same geo into a single zone, such as locally redundant storage, protecting from a regional outage.
Comparison
Microsoft also provides the following table to show storage comparisons across redundancies:
| Scenario | Locally redundant storage | Geo-redundant storage | Read Access geo-redundant storage | Zone-redundant storage | Geo Zone Redundant Storage | Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage |
| Node unavailability within a data center | Yes | |||||
| An entire data center (zonal or non-zonal) becomes unavailable | No | Yes (failover is required) | Yes | Yes | ||
| A region-wide outage | No | Yes (failover is required) | No | Yes (failover is required) | ||
| Read access to your data (in a remote, geo-replicated region) in the event of region-wide unavailability | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Designed to provide X% durability of objects over a given year | at least 11 9’s | at least 16 9’s | at least 12 9’s | at least 16 9’s | ||
| Supported storage account types | GPv2, GPv1, Blob | GPv2 | ||||
| Availability SLA for read requests | At least 99.9% (99% for Cool Access Tier) | At least 99.99% (99.9% for Cool Access Tier) | At least 99.9% (99% for cool access tier) | At least 99.99% (99.9% for Cool Access Tier) | ||
| Availability SLA for write requests | At least 99.9% (99% for Cool Access Tier) | |||||
