Storage

Protecting your production data is critical for any business. That’s why Azure Files has a multi-layered approach to ensuring your data is highly available, backed up, and recoverable.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (GZRS)—providing protection against regional disasters and Account failover—allowing you to determine when to initiate a failover instead.

Blob Index—a managed secondary index, allowing you to store multi-dimensional object attributes to describe your data objects for Azure Blob storage—is now available in preview.

Microsoft Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

Announcing the preview of Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage—a new capability of Azure Data Lake Storage, which improves both performance and cost.

Since launching Azure Archive Storage, we have seen unprecedented interest and innovative usage from a variety of industries. Archive Storage is built as a scalable service for cost-effectively storing rarely accessed data for long periods of time.

Today marks the general availability of new Azure disk sizes, including 4, 8, and 16 GiB on both Premium & Standard SSDs, as well as bursting support on Azure Premium SSD Disks.

We’re announcing the general availability of incremental snapshots of Azure Managed Disks, which gives customers a cost-effective point-in-time backup for Managed Disks.

To help users be more productive and deliberate in their actions while emailing, the web version of Outlook and the Outlook for iOS and Android app have introduced suggested replies, a new feature powered by Azure Machine Learning service.

We’re announcing the general availability of Python, .NET, Java, and JS filesystem SDKs for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 in all Azure regions.

Skytap on Azure allows businesses to innovate with the cloud faster, while minimizing impact to traditional applications running on IBM Power.

We are excited to announce the preview of Azure Files Active Directory (Azure AD) Authentication. You can now mount your Azure Files using Azure AD credentials with the exact same access control experience as on-premises.