General Availability: Azure Files geo-redundancy for standard large file shares

Azure Files is excited to announce that geo-redundancy for 100 TiB standard SMB file shares is now generally available, enabling customers to achieve higher resiliency for production scale workloads.

 

We previously offered 100 TiB standard SMB shares for locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options but geo-redundant storage (GRS/GZRS) was limited to 5 TiB, restricting higher capacity and performance workloads from using this resiliency option.

 

Geo-redundancy is critical to ensure high availability and to meet various compliance and regulatory requirements for your production workloads (for example, line-of-business (LOB) applications). Geo-redundant storage asynchronously replicates to a secondary region enabling you to failover to the secondary region, if the primary region becomes unavailable.

 

 

You don't have to compromise on performance and scale or geo-redundancy for your SMB file shares anymore! All standard SMB file shares that are geo-redundant (both new and existing) can now scale up to 100TiB capacity and have much higher performance limits:

 

Azure Files (GRS and GZRS file shares)	Previous limits	New limits
Capacity per share	5 TiB	100 TiB (20x increase)
Max IOPS per share	1,000 IOPS	Up to storage account limit (20x increase)
Max throughput per share	Up to 60 MiB/s	Up to storage account limit (150x 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.

 

Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares is now generally available in 30 regions and we will be expanding to all regions in the coming months. To view the latest information, see regional availability.

 

Getting started

Getting started is simple and can be accomplished in a few steps:

• Register for the feature using portal or PowerShell.
• Enable geo-redundancy and large file shares for your standard file shares.

Note: We will enable large file shares by default for all new and existing standard storage accounts within the next few months and feature registration will no longer be required.

 

To learn more, see the Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares documentation.

 

Feedback

If you have questions or feedback, please reach out to us at [email protected].