If you’re interested in cloud storage, there’s some significant news coming from Microsoft’s Azure. They’ve recently announced that their geo-redundancy feature for large file shares is now available for public preview for standard SMB file shares.
Geo-redundancy is a crucial data storage feature. It involves duplicating and storing data in a separate region, providing a useful backup if the primary region encounters any issues. This feature is vital for meeting various compliance and regulatory requirements.
Previously, Azure supported large file shares, offering up to 100TiB of file share capacity. However, these large file shares did not support geo-redundancy. With this new update, users can benefit from the high performance and large scale of Azure’s file shares while also enjoying the security of geo-redundancy.
This update significantly increases the capabilities of Azure’s file shares. The capacity per share has increased twentyfold, from 5TiB to 100TiB. The maximum IOPS (Input/Output operations per second) per share has also increased twenty times, from 1,000 IOPS to 20,000 IOPS.
The cost of this new feature will depend on the standard file share tier and the redundancy option chosen for the storage account. Currently, the public preview is available in 32 regions, with plans to expand further.
To start using geo-redundancy for your large file shares, you’ll need to register for the preview through the portal or PowerShell, and then enable geo-redundancy and large file shares for your standard SMB file shares.
For more information, you can check out the Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares preview documentation. If you have any questions or feedback, you can contact Microsoft directly.