Azure Storage Account Overview & Easy to understand.

Azure Storage Account

Azure storage account is Cloud based azure storage solution , Where you can store your .VHD’s,Data,Tables,queues etc files.

Azure storage provides the following four services to store the different types of Data within the Azure Platform.

• Blob storage:

Blob Storage stores unstructured object data.A blob can be any type of text or binary data, such as a document, media file, or application installer.Blob storage is also referred to as Object storage.

• Table storage: 

Table Storage stores structured datasets. Table storage is a NoSQL key-attribute data store, which allows for rapid development and fast access to large quantities of data.

• Queue storage:

Queue Storage provides reliable messaging for workflow processing and for communication between components of cloud services.

• File storage:

File Storage offers shared storage for legacy applications using the standard SMB protocol. Azure virtual machines and cloud services can share file data across application components via mounted shares, and on-premises applications can access file data in a share via the File service REST API.

Below are the stracturacle Windows Azure Storage Diagram to understand work Flow Easily.

Types of Azure Storage Accounts:

Standard Storage Account:

I will gives you the access to Azure Storage services such as Tables, Queues, Files, Blobs and Azure virtual machine disks under a single account.

“Standard Storage is normal HDDs disks and delivers cost-effective storage compare to Premium storage disk. Standard storage can be replicated locally in one datacenter, or be geo-redundant with primary and secondary data centers.”

Premium Storage Account:

Azure Premium Storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines (VMs) with input/output (I/O)-intensive workloads. VM disks that use Premium Storage store data on solid-state drives (SSDs). To take advantage of the speed and performance of premium storage disks, you can migrate existing VM disks to Premium Storage.

Azure Storage Accounts: Replication for durability and high availability.

It is important, While creating the azure storage account you need choose the below option based on your data, Application and other services criticality and choose the below option very carefully while creating the storage account.

As it is defining your replication and High availability for your Azure Environments.

• Locally redundant storage (LRS).

Locally redundant storage maintains three copies of your data. LRS is replicated three times within a single data center in a single region.

LRS protects your data from normal hardware failures, but not from the failure of a single data center.

• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS).

Zone-redundant storage maintains three copies of your data. ZRS is replicated three times across two to three facilities,either within a single region or across two regions, providing higher durability than LRS. ZRS ensures that your data is durable within a single region.

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS).

GRS maintains six copies of your data. With GRS, your data is replicated three times within the primary region, and is also replicated three times in a secondary region hundreds of miles away from the primary region.

Providing the highest level of durability. In the event of a failure at the primary region, Azure Storage will failover to the secondary region. GRS ensures that your data is durable in two separate regions.

• Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS).

It’s replicates your data to a secondary geographic location, and also provides read access to your data in the secondary location.

It’s allows you to access your data from either the primary or the secondary location, in the event that one location becomes unavailable.

It is the default option for your storage account by default when you create it.