We released a “less expensive” storage tier called “Cold tier” – which is approaches the costs of our lowest cost offering, “Archive Tier”, for folks retaining data in Azure Storage that needs to be accesses a few times a year & has a data read & data retrieval costs that aren’t exorbitant.
Cool/Cold is good for folks that know they’ll definitely need to pull data a handful of times during the year – and not just store the data for retention/compliance reasons. Read more about the differences here: “Access tiers for blob data – Azure Storage”.
Here’s the announcement:
Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier is now generally available. It is a new online access tier that is the most cost-effective Azure Blob offering for storing infrequently accessed data with long-term retention requirements, while providing instant access.
Azure Blob Storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. With blob access tiers, you can store your data most cost-effectively based on how frequently it will be accessed and how long it will be retained.
The pricing of the cold tier storage option lies between the cool and archive tiers, and it follows a 90-day early deletion policy. You can seamlessly utilize the cold tier in the same way as the hot and cool tiers, through REST API, SDKs, tools, and lifecycle management policies.
Refer to the blog and documentation for additional details. You can find pricing information on the Azure Blob
GENERAL SUMMARY:
To quote, our docs, “Data in the cool and cold tiers have slightly lower availability, but offer the same high durability, retrieval latency, and throughput characteristics as the hot tier.
For data in the cool or cold tiers, slightly lower availability and higher access costs may be acceptable trade-offs for lower overall storage costs, as compared to the hot tier. For more information, see SLA for storage.”
Cost differences are:
- Cold storage capacity cost is ~80% less than the cost of Hot, ~50% less than the cost of Cool
- Cold storage write operations cost 4x the cost of Hot, 2x the cost of Cool
- Cold storage read operations cost 26x the cost of Cool, 10x the cost of Cool
- Cold storage data retrieval cost is 3x the cost of Cool
EXAMPLE:
For example, charges for 100TB of Azure Storage in WestUS 2: (According to https://aka.ms/pricing)
- Capacity:
- Hot $1800/mo
- Cool $1000/mo
- Cold $400/mo
- Archive $100/mo
- Writes/10000 operations:
- Hot $.065
- Cool $1.30
- Cold $2.34
- Archive $1.30
- Reads/10000 operations:
- Hot $.05
- Cool $.13
- Cold $1.30
- Archive $65.00 or $650.00 (High priority)
- Data Retrieval
- Hot N/A
- Cool $10/TB
- Cold $30/TB
- Archive $20/TB or $100/TB (High priority)
Here’s our recent posts about the NEW Cold access tier for Azure Storage:
- ANNOUNCEMENT: “Efficiently store data with Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier — now generally available”
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/efficiently-store-data-with-azure-blob-storage-cold-tier-now-generally-available/ - DOCUMENTATION:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/access-tiers-overview
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