Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks in public preview
Published date: May 12, 2021
Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks is now available on Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in public preview in West Europe, North Europe, West US 2 and France Central regions. Disks with ZRS provide synchronous replication of data across the zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues. Disks with ZRS maintain three consistent copies of the data in distinct Availability Zones in a region, making them tolerant to outages. They also allow you to maximize your virtual machine availability without the need for application-level replication of data across zones, which is not supported by many legacy applications such as old versions of SQL or industry-specific proprietary software. This means that, if a virtual machine becomes unavailable in an affected Zone, you can continue to work with the disk by mounting it to a virtual machine in a different zone. You can also use the ZRS option with shared disks to provide improved availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS or GFS2.