Archive Storage is now generally available. Please refer to “Cloud storage now more affordable: Announcing general availability of Azure Archive Storage” blog post for more details.

From startups to large organizations, our customers in every industry have experienced exponential growth of their data. A significant amount of this data is rarely accessed but must be stored for a long period of time to meet business continuity and compliance requirements. Examples include employee data, medical records, customer information, financial records, backups, etc. Additionally, recent and coming advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics are unlocking value from data that might have previously been discarded. Customers want to keep more of these data sets for a longer period but need a scalable and cost-effective solution to do so.

Last year, we launched Cool Blob Storage to help customers reduce storage costs by tiering their infrequently accessed data to the Cool tier. Today we’re announcing the public preview of Archive Blob Storage designed to help organizations reduce their storage costs even further by storing rarely accessed data in our lowest-priced tier yet. Furthermore, we’re excited to introduce the public preview of Blob-Level Tiering enabling you to optimize storage costs by easily managing the lifecycle of your data across these tiers at the object level.

The CEO of HubStor, a leading enterprise backup and archiving company, stated: “We are jumping for joy to see the amazing design Microsoft successfully implemented. Azure Archive Blob Storage is indeed an excellent example of Microsoft leapfrogging the competition.”

Azure Archive Blob Storage

Azure Archive Blob storage is designed to provide organizations with a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements (on the order of hours). See Azure Blob Storage: Hot, cool, and archive tiers to learn more.

The Archive tier, in addition to Hot and Cool access tiers, is now available in Blob Storage accounts. Archive Storage characteristics include:

Cost-effectiveness : Archive access tier is our lowest priced storage offering. Customers with long-term storage which is rarely accessed can take advantage of this. For more details on regional preview pricing, see Azure Storage Pricing.

: Archive access tier is our lowest priced storage offering. Customers with long-term storage which is rarely accessed can take advantage of this. For more details on regional preview pricing, see Azure Storage Pricing. Seamless Integration : Customers use the same familiar operations on blobs in the Archive tier as on blobs in the Hot and Cool access tiers. This will enable customers to easily integrate the new access tier into their applications.

: Customers use the same familiar operations on blobs in the Archive tier as on blobs in the Hot and Cool access tiers. This will enable customers to easily integrate the new access tier into their applications. Durability : All access tiers including Archive are designed to offer the same high durability that you have come to expect from Azure Storage with the same data replication options available today.

: All access tiers including Archive are designed to offer the same high durability that you have come to expect from Azure Storage with the same data replication options available today. Security: All data in the Archive access tier is automatically encrypted at rest.

Blob-Level Tiering: easily optimize storage costs without moving your data

To simplify data lifecycle management, we now allow customers to tier their data at the blob level. Customers can easily change the access tier of a blob among the Hot, Cool, or Archive tiers as usage patterns change, without having to move data between accounts. Blobs in all three access tiers can co-exist within the same account.

Flexible management

Archive Storage and Blob-level Tiering will be available on all Blob Storage accounts. For customers with large volumes of data in General Purpose accounts, we will allow upgrading your account to get access to Cool, Archive, and Blob-level Tiering at GA.

A user may access the feature using .NET (see Figure 1), the Azure portal (see Figure 2), the Java client library, Python (preview), Node.js client libraries, or REST APIs initially.

Figure 1: Set blob access tier using .NET client library

Figure 2: Set blob access tier in portal

Pricing

Pricing for Azure Archive Blob Storage during preview will be reduced. Please refer to the Azure Blobs Storage Pricing page for more details.

How to get started

NOTE: Archive Storage is now generally available and no feature registration is required to use this service.

To enroll in the public preview, you will need to submit a request to register this feature to your subscription. After your request is approved (within 1-2 days), any new LRS Blob Storage account you create in US East 2 will have the Archive access tier enabled, and all new accounts in all public regions will have blob-level tiering enabled. During preview, only LRS accounts will be supported but we plan to extend support to GRS and RA-GRS accounts (new and existing) as well at GA. Blob-level tiering will not be supported for any blob with snapshots. As with most previews, this should not be used for production workloads until the feature reaches GA.

To submit a request, run the following PowerShell or CLI commands.

PowerShell

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowArchive -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

This will return the following response:

FeatureName ProviderName RegistrationState ----------- ------------ ----------------- AllowArchive Microsoft.Storage Pending

It may take 1-2 days to receive approval. To verify successful registration approval, run the following command:

Get-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowArchive -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage

If the feature was approved and properly registered, you should receive the following output:

FeatureName ProviderName RegistrationState ----------- ------------ ----------------- AllowArchive Microsoft.Storage Registered

CLI 2.0

az feature register –-namespace Microsoft.Storage –-name AllowArchive

This will return the following response:

{ "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.Features/providers/Microsoft.Storage/features/AllowArchive", "name": "Microsoft.Storage/AllowArchive", "properties": { "state": "Pending" }, "type": "Microsoft.Features/providers/features" }

It may take 1-2 days to receive approval. To verify successful registration approval, run the following command:

-az feature show –-namespace Microsoft.Storage –-name AllowArchive

If the feature was approved and properly registered, you should receive the following output:

{ "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.Features/providers/Microsoft.Storage/features/AllowArchive", "name": "Microsoft.Storage/AllowArchive", "properties": { "state": "Registered" }, "type": "Microsoft.Features/providers/features" }

Get it, use it, and tell us about it

We’re confident that Azure Archive Blob Storage will provide another critical element for optimizing your organization’s cloud data storage strategy. As this is a preview, we look forward to hearing your feedback on these features, which you can send by email to us at archivefeedback@microsoft.com.