We are pleased to announce the General Availability of zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS in select regions. Zonal placement enables you to pin Azure Files storage accounts to a specific Availability Zone within a region — giving you better control over data locality, resilience, and lower latency for your workloads.
Benefits of zonal placement
Azure Files provides both local-redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options today. ZRS is leveraged for workloads that require storage-level replication across zones. For applications using Azure Files Premium LRS with application-level replication, customers can now pin storage resources to a specific Availability Zone to co-locate storage with compute resources like Virtual Machines (VMs). Zonal placement can be leveraged with both SMB and NFS shares, making it ideal for latency sensitive Windows and Linux workloads including databases, enterprise platforms, DevOps tools, and line-of-business applications.
Fig1. Zonal placement allows users to choose the zone for a storage account
Leveraging zonal placement
With zonal placement, you can
- Reduce latency: Choose the same availability zone for storage and compute resources, optimizing latency-sensitive workloads and reducing cross-zone network latency by 10-40%.
- Isolate failure domains: Limit exposure to potential zonal outages, by aligning the compute and storage resources of your application in a single zone.
- Design for zone-aware high availability: Build resiliency with application-level replication across compute and storage resources in each zone.
To configure zonal placement for your workload:
- Select a specific Availability Zone when creating a new Azure Files Premium LRS storage account or update an existing Azure Files Premium LRS storage account to be Availability Zone aware.
- Allocate your compute resources in the same zone as your premium storage account zone.
Get started today
Start leveraging zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS today. Zonal placement is available in select Azure regions that support Premium LRS and Availability Zones; for the latest list of supported regions, please refer to the zonal placement for Azure File Shares | Microsoft Learn. Whether you’re provisioning new storage or enhancing existing deployments, Zonal placement empowers you to align your compute and storage resources within the same Availability Zone to minimize latency and control availability.
Build more efficient, reliable, and zone-aware solutions with Azure Files—your data is ready for what’s next. For any questions, please reach out to the team at azurefiles@microsoft.com.
Microsoft