Public Preview: Azure Files geo-redundancy for standard large file shares

We’re announcing Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares is now in public preview for standard SMB file shares.

Azure Files has supported large file shares for several years which not only provides file share capacity up to 100TiB but improved IO operations per second (IOPS) and throughput as well. Large file shares are widely adopted by customers using locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) but has not been available for geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS) until now.

Geo-redundancy is critical for meeting various compliance and regulatory requirements. Geo-redundant storage asynchronously replicates to a secondary region and if the primary region becomes unavailable, you can initiate a failover to the secondary region.   

You can now use geo-redundancy and enable large file shares on the same share to significantly increase your standard file share capacity and performance limits:

• Capacity per share limit increases from 5 TiB to 100 TiB (20x increase)
• Max IOPS per share limit increases from 1,000 IOPS to 20,000 IOPS (20x increase)
• Max throughput per share increases from 60 MiB/s up to 300 MiB/s (5x increase)

The public preview is currently available in 32 regions and we will be expanding to all regions.

To learn more, visit Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares.