In June, Microsoft announced the general availability of a new premium tier for its Azure Files service. The new tier, available in 19 regions globally, offers a higher level of performance and flexibility, with services built upon SSDs. With regards to Azure Storage, the Redmond firm introduced a public preview of geo zone redundant storage (GZRS) last month, and later introduced some new features and enhancements for the file storage service.
Now, Microsoft has unveiled general availability for zone redundant storage (ZRS) with Azure Files Premium. ZRS in the premium tier will allow for the usage of highly performant file services.
Previously, only locally-redundant storage (LRS) was offered in the premium model, and now, this will be coupled with ZRS, bringing lower-cost storage with the former and higher availability with the latter. ZRS manages to offer high availability by synchronously creating three replicas of user data in three different Azure Availability Zones. As such, even in cases of entire zone outages, users' data is still protected. Moreover, even if one zone is unavailable, ZRS still allows for the writing and reading of data.
ZRS Azure premium files accounts can be created through Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. More details regarding the properties that need to be set during the creation of a premium account in the Azure Portal can be observed below:
Live account migration on request for LRS premium files to ZRS is not supported yet. However, users can manually copy or move data from an existing LRS account to a new ZRS one. You can find more about how to migrate data here, and find out pricing options for ZRS here. Storage prices for ZRS in a General Purpose v2 (premium) account begin at $0.36 per provisioned GiB of data each month. However, it is currently only available in West Europe, with expansion to other regions coming soon.
You can read more about Azure Files premium tier here. Feedback can also be shared on the Azure Storage forum or emailed to azurefiles@microsoft.com.
