This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.
We are happy to share that we have introduced a new level of backup storage redundancy for the Azure SQL Managed Instance, increasing ever-important protection and availability of customer backups.
The new Geo-Zone Redundant Storage combines the best of the 2 worlds - Geo-Redundant and Zone-Redundant storages, keeping them safe from both Regional (Geo-Redundant) and Data Center (Zone-Redundant) failures. It provides the highest availability for storage, currently offered on Azure.
Geo-Zone Redundant Storage (GZRS) for Azure SQL Managed Instance backups provides 3 synchronous copies in the different availability zones within the same primary region, plus an additional asynchronous copy within a single availability zone in the paired secondary region, as shown on the picture below:
Note that Geo-Zone Redundant Storage (GZRS) is designed to provide at least 99.99999999999999% (16 9's) durability of objects over a given year.
With availability of this backup storage option, customers who select it can expect that in the case of a recovery within the same primary region – the process should be significantly faster, given that no matter which availability zone will get it, the backup data will be read locally, instead of potentially adding additional network delay. The same logic applies for restoring a backup – it should consistently improve (or at very least provide the same performance for restoring a backup of a customer database when using any other currently available backup storage).
Another important aspect to have in mind is that in the case your Availability zone goes down:
- for GRS, you must take GeoRestore, and thus you will have only the last restorable point from your paired region available for a restore
- for GZRS, you may take any regular restore from a different Availability Zone and have access to any Point-in-time Restore (PITR)
In Portal, when creating an instance, GZRS is the 4th option for the customers to choose from and from now on SQL Managed Instance can take advantage of this option, as shown on the picture below:
As of today, GZRS is available for a subset of Azure regions – the current requirements are the following:
- Having a geo-paired region
- Having multiple availability zones within both data centers (primary and secondary).
For more information about GZRS and other storage offerings, please consult respective article in our documentation - Data redundancy - Azure Storage.
If your workload needs the characteristics described above – with the highest availability & performance, you should consider starting using the new Geo-Zone Redundant backup storage (GZRS).