The data in your Microsoft Azure storage account is always replicated to ensure durability and high availability. Azure Storage replication copies your data so that it is protected from planned and unplanned events ranging from transient hardware failures, network or power outages, massive natural disasters, and so on. You can choose to replicate your data within the same data center, across zonal data centers within the same region, and even across regions.
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.
Choosing a replication option
When you create a storage account, you can select one of the following replication options:
- Locally redundant storage (LRS)
- Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
- Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
The following table provides a quick overview of the scope of durability and availability that each replication strategy will provide you for a given type of event (or event of similar impact).
| Scenario | LRS | ZRS | GRS | RA-GRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Node unavailability within a data center | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| An entire data center (zonal or non-zonal) becomes unavailable | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| A region-wide outage | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Read access to your data (in a remote, geo-replicated region) in the event of region-wide unavailability | No | No | No | Yes |
| Designed to provide _ durability of objects over a given year | at least 99.999999999% (11 9’s) | at least 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) | at least 99.99999999999999% (16 9’s) | at least 99.99999999999999% (16 9’s) |
| Supported storage account types | GPv1, GPv2, Blob | GPv2 | GPv1, GPv2, Blob | GPv1, GPv2, Blob |
See Azure Storage Pricing for pricing information on the different redundancy options.
Note
Premium Storage supports only locally redundant storage (LRS). For information about Premium Storage, see Premium Storage: High-Performance Storage for Azure Virtual Machine Workloads.
Changing replication strategy
We allow you to change your storage account’s replication strategy by using the Azure portal, Azure Powershell, Azure CLI, or one of the many Azure client libraries. Changing the replication type of your storage account does not result in down time.
Note
Currently, you cannot use the Portal or API to convert your account to ZRS. If you want to convert your account’s replication to ZRS, see Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) for details.
Are there any costs to changing my account’s replication strategy?
It depends on your conversion path. Ordering from cheapest to the most expensive redundancy offering we have LRS, ZRS, GRS, and RA-GRS. For example, going from LRS to anything will incur additional charges because you are going to a more sophisticated redundancy level. Going to GRS or RA-GRS will incur an egress bandwidth charge because your data (in your primary region) is being replicated to your remote secondary region. This is a one-time charge at initial setup. After the data is copied, there are no further conversion charges. You will only be charged for replicating any new or updates to existing data. For details on bandwidth charges, see Azure Storage Pricing page.
If you change from GRS to LRS, there is no additional cost, but your replicated data is deleted from the secondary location.