Azure Storage Services

1. Azure Storage Services

It's time to dive deeper into Azure’s storage services.

2. Navigating storage needs

Azure offers diverse storage options to suit various needs and use cases, and businesses often find themselves with diverse storage challenges on their digital transformation journey.

3. Storage tiers

Let’s first start by understanding Azure’s storage tiers - these are optimized for access needs and costs. First is the ‘hot’ tier, which offers high-speed storage for frequently accessed data such as website assets but operates at a higher cost.

4. Storage tiers

Next, we have the cool tier, which offers affordable storage for infrequently accessed data that requires fast access.

5. Storage tiers

Finally, the archive tier provides a low-cost storage solution for long-term, infrequently accessed data with slower retrieval times. Most organizational data should sit in cost-effective tiers for long-term retention, and Azure Storage can auto-shift tiers as needed.

6. Storage offerings

We'll explore four different storage offerings from Azure in more detail: Blob Storage, Data Lake Storage, Files, and Backup/Recovery.

7. Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob, or binary large object Storage, is designed to store unstructured data like text, video, or images. It’s built to be highly scalable, allowing for the storage of vast amounts of data that can be accessed globally. This could include data from sensors for a weather station containing images, video, and logs.

8. Azure Blob Storage

Think of the Blob Service as similar to a modern-day storage facility where many items are stored in various units/containers. Think of each blob as an individual storage container. With Blob Storage, the data is always accessible and secure, with the option for hot, cold, and archive storage tiers. Both users and client applications can access objects easily via HTTP/HTTPS anywhere in the world.

9. Azure Data Lake Storage

Azure Data Lake Storage is a service for storing and analyzing large volumes of data, combining the large-scale storage capabilities of Blob Storage with a hierarchical file system. This enables efficient data organization and access for analytical purposes. It’s designed to handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data at a scale of petabytes, making it suitable for big data analytics projects. Some examples of high-volume data could include traffic and utility datasets that may need complex analysis for planning and forecasting. It can be compared to a comprehensive library that offers a unified space for various data types.

10. Azure Files

Azure File storage is a cloud-managed file-sharing service and can be a great tool for addressing internal file-sharing and seamless collaboration within an organization. It seamlessly integrates with existing Windows applications and Azure Services. It can manage vast data volumes and has various redundancy options to safeguard your data.

11. Azure Backup and Recovery

Azure Backup and Recovery focuses on securely backing up both on-premises and cloud workloads. It uses Azure Storage Services to store backup data securely, emphasizing data protection and disaster recovery, making restoring data easy with Azure Backup. Backups are a seamless process in the background for your on-premises or cloud-based systems.

12. Data redundancy

Finally, we’ll finish by looking at Azure’s data redundancy options. Azure redundancy duplicates data across locations, ensuring availability even when outages occur. There are three data redundancy options with Azure: Locally Redundant, Geo-Redundant, and Zone-Redundant.

13. Data redundancy

Locally redundant storage, or LRS, replicates data within a single data center, providing basic redundancy at a cost-effective rate.

14. Data redundancy

Geo-redundant storage or GRS replicates data to another region, enhancing redundancy and disaster recovery.

15. Data redundancy

Lastly, zone-redundant storage, or ZRS, replicates data across availability zones in one region for high availability.

16. Let's practice!

Now, let's test your knowledge of Azure’s storage solutions.

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