There are two new features of Azure Storage that will make the end of 2017 very interesting.
New Archiving Tier
A new archiving tier is now available for blob storage. Additional to Cool and Hot access tiers we have now Archive tier. In contrast to the existing ones, it was design for situations when you need to archive data for long periods.
An interesting fact, in comparison with Cool storage is related to SLA. The availability SLA is the same as for Cool storage – 99%, in the context of a tier that is it secure and durable as Cool storage, but it is much cost efficient. From what I see know is more than 5 times cheaper than Cool storage.
The new tier comes in hand-in-hand with the current trend of moving existing infrastructures to Azure. In many situations, there are cases when because of regulatory aspects, you need an archiving solutions for audit data.
Audit data needs to be stored for at least 5 years. With the current price of Hot and Cool tier, it was hard to do something like inside Azure. Cool tier made our life easier, reducing storage cost, but still kept us close to on-premises archive solutions. This happened because in most of the cases you almost never touch the audit archive. There only few situations where you need to access this data and they are only isolated cases.
For situations like this, Archive tier is a perfect feet. The only thing that we need to keep an eye is the price of this tier versus TCO of on-premises archiving solutions.
Access tier switch
From now on, we can change the tier of our storage account without having to move the data from one storage account to another. Additional to this, we are allowed to specify and change the tier at blob level.
It means that we can have full benefits of a hot tier when we write the audit data inside it. But once we finish writing, we can change the tier from hot to archive and forget about it.
The combination of these two new features make us to rethink the archiving solution and look to Azure as an end-to-end solution, including archiving capabilities.
Do not forget
Once you change a tier from Cool to Archive tier you will not be able to read the content of that blob. This means that if you need to execute read operations on top of that content you need to change the tier from Archive to Cool.
The operation of changing their tier is called rehydrate and can take up to 15 hours for now (for a blob that is under 50GBs). This is the biggest difference between Cool and Archive tier I would say.
This is acceptable for most of the cases, because in general you don’t need to access audit data and when you need access you can wait half a day for it.
Conclusion
Archive tier promise us not only better prices but also much better solutions, which can respond to our client needs. Let’s keep an close eye on it.
New Archiving Tier
A new archiving tier is now available for blob storage. Additional to Cool and Hot access tiers we have now Archive tier. In contrast to the existing ones, it was design for situations when you need to archive data for long periods.
An interesting fact, in comparison with Cool storage is related to SLA. The availability SLA is the same as for Cool storage – 99%, in the context of a tier that is it secure and durable as Cool storage, but it is much cost efficient. From what I see know is more than 5 times cheaper than Cool storage.
The new tier comes in hand-in-hand with the current trend of moving existing infrastructures to Azure. In many situations, there are cases when because of regulatory aspects, you need an archiving solutions for audit data.
Audit data needs to be stored for at least 5 years. With the current price of Hot and Cool tier, it was hard to do something like inside Azure. Cool tier made our life easier, reducing storage cost, but still kept us close to on-premises archive solutions. This happened because in most of the cases you almost never touch the audit archive. There only few situations where you need to access this data and they are only isolated cases.
For situations like this, Archive tier is a perfect feet. The only thing that we need to keep an eye is the price of this tier versus TCO of on-premises archiving solutions.
Access tier switch
From now on, we can change the tier of our storage account without having to move the data from one storage account to another. Additional to this, we are allowed to specify and change the tier at blob level.
It means that we can have full benefits of a hot tier when we write the audit data inside it. But once we finish writing, we can change the tier from hot to archive and forget about it.
The combination of these two new features make us to rethink the archiving solution and look to Azure as an end-to-end solution, including archiving capabilities.
Do not forget
Once you change a tier from Cool to Archive tier you will not be able to read the content of that blob. This means that if you need to execute read operations on top of that content you need to change the tier from Archive to Cool.
The operation of changing their tier is called rehydrate and can take up to 15 hours for now (for a blob that is under 50GBs). This is the biggest difference between Cool and Archive tier I would say.
This is acceptable for most of the cases, because in general you don’t need to access audit data and when you need access you can wait half a day for it.
Conclusion
Archive tier promise us not only better prices but also much better solutions, which can respond to our client needs. Let’s keep an close eye on it.
Comments
Post a Comment