Tuesday, April 4, 2017

All About Azure Storage replication

All About Azure Storage replication
 
The data in your Microsoft Azure storage account is always replicated to ensure durability and high availability. Replication copies your data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center, depending on which replication option you choose. Replication protects your data and preserves your application up-time in the event of transient hardware failures. If your data is replicated to a second data center, that also protects your data against a catastrophic failure in the primary location.

Replication ensures that your storage account meets the Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for Storage even in the face of failures. See the SLA for information about Azure Storage guarantees for durability and availability.

When you create a storage account, you can select one of the following replication options:



·        Geo-redundant storage (GRS)


Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) is the default option when you create a new storage account.

The following table provides a quick overview of the differences between

Replication strategy
LRS
ZRS
GRS
RA-GRS
 
 
 
 
 
Data is replicated across multiple datacenters.
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Data can be read from the secondary location as well as from the primary location.
No
No
No
Yes
Number of copies of data maintained on separate nodes.
3
3
6
6


Locally redundant storage

Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times within a storage scale unit which is hosted in a datacenter in the region in which you created your storage account. A write request returns successfully only once it has been written to all three replicas. These three replicas each reside in separate fault domains and upgrade domains within one storage scale unit.

A storage scale unit is a collection of racks of storage nodes. A fault domain (FD) is a group of nodes that represent a physical unit of failure and can be considered as nodes belonging to the same physical rack. An upgrade domain (UD) is a group of nodes that are upgraded together during the process of a service upgrade (rollout). The three replicas are spread across UDs and FDs within one storage scale unit to ensure that data is available even if hardware failure impacts a single rack or when nodes are upgraded during a rollout.

LRS is the lowest cost option and offers least durability compared to other options. In the event of a datacenter level disaster (fire, flooding etc.) all three replicas might be lost or unrecoverable. To mitigate this risk Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) is recommended for most applications.

Locally redundant storage may still be desirable in certain scenarios:

·        Provides highest maximum bandwidth of Azure Storage replication options.

·        If your application stores data that can be easily reconstructed, you may opt for LRS.

·        Some applications are restricted to replicating data only within a country due to data governance requirements. A paired region could be in another country; please see Azure regions for information on region pairs.

 Zone-redundant storage

Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your data asynchronously across datacenters within one or two regions in addition to storing three replicas similar to LRS, thus providing higher durability than LRS. Data stored in ZRS is durable even if the primary datacenter is unavailable or unrecoverable. Customers who plan to use ZRS should be aware that:+

·        ZRS is only available for block blobs in general purpose storage accounts, and is supported only in storage service versions 2014-02-14 and later.

·        Since asynchronous replication involves a delay, in the event of a local disaster it is possible that changes that have not yet been replicated to the secondary will be lost if the data cannot be recovered from the primary.

·        The replica may not be available until Microsoft initiates failover to the secondary.

·        ZRS accounts cannot be converted later to LRS or GRS. Similarly, an existing LRS or GRS account cannot be converted to a ZRS account.

·        ZRS accounts do not have metrics or logging capability.

Geo-redundant storage

Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates your data to a secondary region that is hundreds of miles away from the primary region. If your storage account has GRS enabled, then your data is durable even in the case of a complete regional outage or a disaster in which the primary region is not recoverable.

For a storage account with GRS enabled, an update is first committed to the primary region, where it is replicated three times. Then the update is replicated asynchronously to the secondary region, where it is also replicated three times. With GRS, both the primary and secondary regions manage replicas across separate fault domains and upgrade domains within a storage scale unit as described with LRS.


Considerations:

·        Since asynchronous replication involves a delay, in the event of a regional disaster it is possible that changes that have not yet been replicated to the secondary region will be lost if the data cannot be recovered from the primary region.

·        The replica is not available unless Microsoft initiates failover to the secondary region. If Microsoft does initiate a failover to the secondary region, you will have read and write access to that data after the failover has completed. For more information, please see Disaster Recovery Guidance.

·        If an application wants to read from the secondary region, the user should enable RA-GRS.

When you create a storage account, you select the primary region for the account. The secondary region is determined based on the primary region, and cannot be changed. The following table shows the primary and secondary region pairings.

Primary
Secondary
North Central US
South Central US
South Central US
North Central US
East US
West US
West US
East US
US East 2
Central US
Central US
US East 2
North Europe
West Europe
West Europe
North Europe
South East Asia
East Asia
East Asia
South East Asia
East China
North China
North China
East China
Japan East
Japan West
Japan West
Japan East
Brazil South
South Central US
Australia East
Australia Southeast
Australia Southeast
Australia East
India South
India Central
India Central
India South
US Gov Iowa
US Gov Virginia
US Gov Virginia
US Gov Iowa
Canada Central
Canada East
Canada East
Canada Central
UK West
UK South
UK South
UK West
Germany Central
Germany Northeast
Germany Northeast
Germany Central
West US 2
West Central US
West Central US
West US 2

For up-to-date information about regions supported by Azure, see Azure Regions.

 
Read-access geo-redundant storage

Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) maximizes availability for your storage account, by providing read-only access to the data in the secondary location, in addition to the replication across two regions provided by GRS.

When you enable read-only access to your data in the secondary region, your data is available on a secondary endpoint, in addition to the primary endpoint for your storage account. The secondary endpoint is similar to the primary endpoint, but appends the suffix –secondary to the account name. For example, if your primary endpoint for the Blob service is myaccount.blob.core.windows.net, then your secondary endpoint is myaccount-secondary.blob.core.windows.net. The access keys for your storage account are the same for both the primary and secondary endpoints.

Considerations:

·        Your application has to manage which endpoint it is interacting with when using RA-GRS.

·        Since asynchronous replication involves a delay, in the event of a regional disaster it is possible that changes that have not yet been replicated to the secondary region will be lost if the data cannot be recovered from the primary region.

·        If Microsoft initiates failover to the secondary region, you will have read and write access to that data after the failover has completed. For more information, please see Disaster Recovery Guidance.

·        RA-GRS is intended for high-availability purposes. For scalability guidance, please review the performance checklist.

Premium Storage

·        Premium Storage supports only locally redundant storage (LRS). For information about Premium Storage, see Premium Storage: High-Performance Storage for Azure Virtual Machine Workloads.

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