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

Published Wednesday, May 24, 2023

We’re excited to announce 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.

Choosing between performance and scale or geo-redundancy is no longer necessary! You can now use geo-redundancy and enable large file shares on new and existing storage accounts to significantly increase your standard file share capacity and performance limits while benefiting from geo-redundancy:

Azure Files	Previous limits	Large file share limits
Capacity per share	5 TiB	100 TiB (20x increase)
Max IOPS per share	1,000 IOPS	20,000 IOPS (20x increase)
Max throughput per share	Up to 60 MiB/s	Up to 300 MiB/s (5x increase)

For more information on Azure storage redundancy and choosing what’s right for you, see Azure Storage redundancy.

Pricing and availability

Pricing is based on the standard file share tier and redundancy option configured for the storage account. To learn more, see Azure Files Pricing.

The public preview is currently available in 32 regions and we will be expanding to all regions. To view the latest information, see regional availability.