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Cloud: Zone Redundant Storage Released on General Availability

The report is drafted from a press release of the Microsoft Azure team on the uses and advantages of the ZRS.

Sept. 21, 2021, 5:34 p.m.

TL;DR

Microsoft announces its release of the Zone Redundant Storage option on the General availability after a preview release earlier this year.

The ZRS is available across the premium and standard SSD for different prices and operation options.

Key Facts

1
Microsoft releases the Zone redundant Storage (ZRS) into General Availability.
2
Microsoft customers now have the option of choosing between the ZRS and the Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).
3
Allocation of Primary and Secondary Virtual Machines (VMs) in different zones is now possible.
4
Multiple zones back up across container applications on the Azure Kubernetes Service
5
Cost-effective solution to duplicating data between VMs in different zones.

Details

Following the release success of the preview of the ZRS, Microsoft released the Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) option on General Availability (GA) to improve the dependability of their infrastructure. In cases of failures across different zones in a region, a customer's disk can withstand these failures due to a synchronous copy of block storage across different zones.

The ZRS is released as a way of improving the shared disk for Azure disk Storage. Combining the shared disk and ZRS, Microsoft customers can enhance their cluster applications, including SQL Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) and the SAP ASC/SCS.

Customers also have the option now to assign Primary and Secondary VMs across different zones. They can also connect a ZRS shared disk to these VM's to increase availability. In the instance of the outage of one VM, there would be a backup switch to the other VM. ZRS is also available to customers with Linux based clustering options using IO fencing with SCSI reservations

The ZRS disks can also be used on the Azure Kubernetes Service Clusters hosted on different zones. This allows the container application to failover to a properly functioning zone in the instance of a failed zone.

When a customer uses an older version of a legacy application like an SQL server, ZRS allows the customer to improve availability through storage level replication to prevent total unavailability on the instance of a failed zone.

When compared to the locally Redundant Storage, the cost of maintaining multiple copies of data is reduced by a multiple of 1.5 as the need to deploy more than one is removed. The ZRS performs replications across VMs, reducing write latency. The performance of the ZRS disks, when compared to the LRS, shows similar bandwidth and IOPS. More information on these is provided by the general manager in this article discussing the release.

The ZRS is available across the premium and standard SSD for different prices and operation options.