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Geo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure now in preview

Announcing the preview of Geo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage provides a great balance of high performance, high availability, and disaster recovery and is beneficial when building highly available applications or services in Azure.
Update May 6, 2020: Geo-zone-redundant storage is now generally available. Please refer to our documentation for the latest details.

Announcing the preview of Geo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage provides a great balance of high performance, high availability, and disaster recovery and is beneficial when building highly available applications or services in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage helps achieve higher data resiliency by doing the following:

  • 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.

When using Geo Zone Redundant Storage, you can continue to read and write the data even if one of the availability zones in the primary region is unavailable. In the event of a regional failure, you can also use Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage to continue having read access.

Please note that Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage requires a general purpose v2 account and is available for block blobs, non-disk page blobs, files, tables, queues, and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

With the release of the Geo Zone Redundant Storage preview, Azure offers a compelling set of durability options for your storage needs:

Scenario

Locally redundant storage

Geo-redundant storage

Read Access geo-redundant storage

Zone-redundent 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)

 

Current Geo Zone Redundant Storage prices are discounted preview prices and will change at the time of general availability. For details on various redundancy options please refer to Azure Storage redundancy documentation. In regions where Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage is not available you can still use it to build highly available applications.

The preview of Geo Zone Redundant Storage and Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage is initially available in US East with more regions to follow in 2019. Please check our documentation for the latest list of regions where the preview is enabled.

You can create a Geo Zone Redundant Storage account using various methods including the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager, and the Azure Storage Management SDK. Refer to Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage documentation for more details.

Converting from locally redundant storage, geo-redundant storage, read-access geo-redundant storage, or zone-redundant storage to Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage is supported. To convert from zone-redundant storage to Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage you can use Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager, and the Azure Storage Management SDK.

There are two options for migrating to Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage from non-zone-redundant storageaccounts:

  • Manually copy or move data to a new Read Access Geo Zone Redundant Storage account from an existing account.
  • Request a live migration.

Please let us know if you have any questions or need our assistance. We are looking forward to your participation in the preview and hearing your feedback.

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