Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for flexibility, cost savings, and predictability
We are excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for the HDD (standard) media tier. Provisioned v2 offers a provisioned billing model, meaning that you pay for what you provision, which enables you to flexibly provision storage, IOPS, and throughput. This allows you to migrate your general-purpose workloads to Azure at the best price and performance, but without sacrificing price predictability. With provisioned v2, you have granular control to scale your file share alongside your workload needs – whether you are connecting from a remote client, in hybrid mode with Azure File Sync, or running an application in Azure. The provisioned v2 model enables you to dynamically scale up or down your application’s performance as needed, without downtime. Provisioned v2 file shares can span from 32 GiB to 256 TiB in size, with up to 50,000 IOPS and 5 GiB/sec throughput, providing the flexibility to handle both small and large workloads. If you’re an existing user of Azure Files, you may be familiar with the current “pay-as-you-go” model for the HDD (standard) media tier. While conceptually, this model is simple – you pay for the storage and transactions used – usage-based pricing can be incredibly challenging to understand and use because it’s very difficult or impossible to accurately predict the usage on a file share. Without knowing how much usage you will drive, especially in terms of transactions, you can’t make accurate predictions about your Azure Files bill ahead of time, making planning and budgeting difficult. The provisioned v2 model solves all these problems – and more! Increased scale and performance In addition to the usability improvements of a provisioned model, we have significantly increased the limits over the current “pay-as-you-go” model: Quantity HDD pay-as-you-go HDD provisioned v2 Maximum share size 100 TiB (102,400 GiB) 256 TiB (262,144 GiB) Maximum share IOPS 40,000 IOPS (recently increased from 20,000 IOPS) 50,000 IOPS Maximum share throughput Variable based on region, split between ingress/egress. 5 GiB / sec (symmetric throughput) The larger limits offered on the HDD media tier in the provisioned v2 model mean that as your storage requirements grow, your file share can keep pace without the need to resort to unnatural workarounds such as sharding, allowing you to keep your data in logical file shares that make sense for your organization. Per share monitoring Since provisioning decisions are made on the file share level, in the provisioned v2 model, we’ve brought the granularity of monitoring down to the file share level. This is a significant improvement over pay-as-you-go file shares, which can only be monitored at the storage account level. To help you monitor the usage of storage, IOPS, and throughput against the provisioned limits of the file share, we’ve added the following new metrics: Transactions by Max IOPS, which provides the maximum IOPS used over the indicated time granularity. Bandwidth by Max MiB/sec, which provides the maximum throughput in MiB/sec used over the indicated time granularity. File Share Provisioned IOPS, which tracks the provisioned IOPS of the share on an hourly basis. File Share Provisioned Bandwidth MiB/s, which tracks the provisioned throughput of the share on an hourly basis. Burst Credits for IOPS, which helps you track your IOPS usage against bursting. To use the metrics, navigate to the specific file share in the Portal, and select “Monitoring > Metrics”. Select the metric you want, in this case, “Transactions by Max IOPS”, and ensure that the usage is filtered to the specific file share you want to examine. How to get access to the provisioned v2 billing model? The provisioned v2 model is generally available now, at the time of writing, in a limited set of regions. When you create a storage account in a region that has been enabled for provisioned v2, you can create a provisioned v2 account by selecting “Standard” for Performance, and “Provisioned v2” for File share billing. See how to create a file share for more information. When creating a share in a provisioned v2 storage account, you can specify the capacity and use the recommended performance. The recommendations we provide for IOPS and throughput are based on common usage patterns. If you know your workloads performance needs, you can manually set the IOPS and throughput to further tune your share. As you use your share, you may find that your usage pattern changes or that your usage is more or less active than your initial provisioning. You can always increase your storage, IOPS and throughput provisioning to right size for growth and you can also decrease any provisioned quantity after 24 hours have elapsed since your last increase. Storage, IOPS, and throughput changes are effective within a few minutes after a provisioning change. In addition to your baseline provisioned IOPS, we provide credit-based IOPS bursting that enables you to burst up to 3X the amount of provisioned IOPS for up to 1 hour, or as long as credits remain. To learn more about credit-based IOPS bursting, see provisioned v2 bursting. Pricing example To see the new provisioned v2 model in action, let’s compare the costs of the pay-as-you-go model versus the provisioned v2 model for the following Azure File Sync deployment: Storage: 50 used TiB For the pay as we go model, we need usage as expressed in the total number of “transaction buckets” for the month: Write: 3,214 List: 7,706 Read: 7,242 Other: 90 For the provisioned v2 model, we need usage as expressed as the maximum IOPS and throughput (in MiB / sec) hit over the course of an average time period to guide our provisioning decision: Maximum IOPS: 2,100 IOPS Maximum throughput: 85 MiB / sec To deploy a file share using the pay-as-you-go model, you need to pick an access tier to store the data in between transaction optimized, hot, and cool. The correct access tier to pick depends on the activity level of your data: a really active share should pick transaction optimized, while a comparatively inactive share should pick cool. Based on the activity level of this share as described above, cool is the best choice. When you deploy the share, you need to provision more than you use today to ensure the share can support your application as your data continues to grow. Ultimately this how much to provision is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is to start with 2X more than what you use today. There’s no need to keep your share at a consistent provisioned to used ratio. Now we have all the necessary inputs to compare cost: HDD pay-as-you-go cool (cool access tier) HDD provisioned v2 Cost components Used storage: 51,200 GiB * $0.015 / GiB = $768.00 Write TX: 3,214 * $0.1300 / bucket = $417.82 List TX: 7,706 * $0.0650 / bucket = $500.89 Read TX: 7,242 * $0.0130 / bucket = $94.15 Other TX: 90 * $0.0052 / bucket = $0.47 Provisioned storage: 51,200 used GiB * 2 * $0.0073 / GiB = $747.52 Provisioned IOPS: 2,100 IOPS * 2 * $0.402 / IO / sec = $168.84 Provisioned throughput: 85 MiB / sec * 2 * $0.0599 / MiB / sec = $10.18 Total cost $1,781.33 / month $926.54 / month Effective price per used GiB $0.0348 / used GiB $0.0181 / used GiB In this example, the pay-as-you-go file share costs $0.0348 / used GiB while the provisioned v2 file share costs $0.0181 / used GiB, a ~2X cost improvement for provisioned v2 over pay-as-you-go. Shares with different levels of activity will have different results – your mileage may vary. Typically, when deploying a file share for the first time, you would not know what the transaction usage would be, making cost projections for the pay-as-you-go model quite difficult. But it would still be straightforward to compute the provisioned v2 costs. If you don’t know specifically what your IOPS and throughput utilization would be, you can use the built-in recommendations as a starting point. Resources Here are some additional resources on how to get started: Azure Files pricing page Understanding the Azure Files provisioned v2 model | Microsoft Docs How to create an Azure file share | Microsoft Docs (follow the steps for creating a provisioned v2 storage account/file share)Azure File Sync: faster, more secure and Windows Server 2025 support
Azure File Sync enables seamless tiering of data from on-premises Windows Servers to Azure Files for hybrid use cases and simplified migration. It also enables you to leverage the performance, flexibility and compatibility of your on-premises File Server while leveraging the scale and cost effectiveness of Azure Files. The latest updates for Azure File Sync bring a host of exciting features and improvements: Faster server onboarding and disaster recovery (7x improvement), significantly reducing the time to access data on new server endpoints. Sync performance has been significantly improved (10x improvement), reducing the amount of time to migrate shares and sync a large number of changes (for example, permission changes). Windows Server 2025 support ensures that organizations can stay on the cutting edge of technology. Windows Server 2025 introduces enhanced capabilities, offering better scalability, security, and cloud integration. Copilot in Azure can help you quickly troubleshoot and resolve common Azure File Sync issues. Managed identities support is now in preview, enabling a more secure method to authenticate to your Azure File shares. In this blog post, we’ll explore these key updates and what they mean for businesses looking to maximize their Azure File Sync experience. Whether it's reducing your on-premises footprint or ensuring seamless and secure cloud integration, now is the ideal time to embrace Azure File Sync and take full advantage of what it has to offer. Faster server provisioning and improved disaster recovery for Azure File Sync server endpoints One of the most significant updates in Azure File Sync is the dramatic reduction in time required for provisioning new server endpoints. Previously, setting up a new server endpoint could take hours or even days, but with the v19 release and later, we’ve drastically cut down the time it takes to access data on the new server endpoint. This enhancement is critical for disaster recovery and is especially impactful when the Azure file share contains millions of files and folders. Furthermore, to enhance the management experience, we’ve introduced a Provisioning Steps tab in the portal, which allows you to easily determine when server endpoints are ready for use. You can now access data before syncing is complete. As users or applications navigate through their data, the system prioritizes relevant items for quicker access, eliminating the need to wait for a full download. These improvements help businesses quickly get their server endpoints up and running without long delays, improving overall operational efficiency. For more information, see Create an Azure File Sync server endpoint documentation. Improved sync performance for migrations & bulk updates Another exciting update for Azure File Sync is the substantial improvement in sync performance, now reaching up to 200 items per second. This marks a tenfold improvement over the past two years. This enhancement strengthens Azure File Sync's role as a seamless migration tool, enabling faster data transfers, especially those that require a large number of file changes (for example, when file permissions are changed). It's particularly beneficial for customers aiming to replace on-premises file servers and manage larger data sizes with Azure File Sync. Support for Windows Server 2025 Azure File Sync now supports Windows Server 2025 which has improved security, performance and manageability . The Azure File Sync extension for Windows Admin Center now supports Windows Servers from Windows Server 2025 down to Windows Server 2012 R2. This makes Azure File Sync suitable for a wide range of organizations regardless of their current server version. Azure File Sync facilitates the modernization of file servers, allowing organizations to seamlessly transition to newer servers running Windows Server 2025. The integration with Windows Admin Center (WAC) provides centralized management, offering a unified interface for managing configurations across multiple File Sync servers. This integration simplifies the management process, reducing complexity and saving time. With this configuration, businesses can utilize Windows Server as a fast cache for their Azure file share and optionally implement cloud tiering for more efficient data management. Enhancing File Sync with Copilot in Azure With Copilot in Azure, you can now supercharge your Azure deployments by taking advantage of cutting-edge AI technology that simplifies troubleshooting and resolution like never before. Whether it’s network misconfigurations, incorrect RBAC permissions, or accidental file share deletions, Copilot makes fixing these issues faster and easier than ever. Copilot automatically detects errors and misconfigurations, guides you through the necessary steps to resolve them, and can even take action on your behalf to fix common problems instantly. If you encounter challenges with Azure File Sync due to incorrect network settings, simply enter a prompt like, “Help me troubleshoot Azure File Sync issues.” Copilot in Azure will walk you through the steps to identify and correct the network misconfigurations, ensuring that your files sync smoothly again. By leveraging Copilot’s intelligent capabilities, you not only save time on manual troubleshooting but also gain the confidence to resolve issues independently, allowing you to focus more on growing your business instead of dealing with roadblocks. With Copilot, you stay ahead of the curve, maximizing productivity and minimizing downtime in your Azure environment. For more information, see Troubleshoot and resolve Azure File Sync issues using Microsoft Copilot. Preview: Managed identities support for enhanced security Azure File Sync now includes support for managed identities (MI). This feature allows organizations to authenticate with Azure File shares using an Entra ID identity, replacing the need for a shared key. The new managed identities support enables more secure authentication across several areas of Azure File Sync, including: Storage Sync Service authentication to Azure File shares Registered server authentication to Azure File shares Registered server authentication to Storage Sync Service For more information, see How to use managed identities with Azure File Sync (preview). Get Started with File Sync Don’t have Azure File Sync yet? To get started, see How to deploy Azure File Sync. Share Your Feedback Your feedback is invaluable to us as it shapes and refines Azure File Sync and Azure Files. Please take a moment to share your feedback with us.General Availability: Vaulted backup for Azure Files - Boost your data security and compliance
We are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Vaulted Backup support in Azure Backup for Azure files - Standard tier to help seamlessly protect your data and applications hosted on Azure file share. With this release, you can now leverage vaulted backup integration to protect Standard SMB file shares. Azure Backup vaulted support for Azure file share provides enhanced data protection with the ability to configure snapshot and vaulted backup in a single policy to a secure backup location(Recovery Services vault) and support regional recovery. Vaulted backup provides advanced protection capabilities like ransomware protection, ability to restore even when file share is deleted which are missing with snapshot only backup. Vaulted backup solution seamlessly integrates with Azure File sync allowing File sync customers to protect data tiered to the cloud long-term in a cost-effective manner. In this blog post let’s explore how Azure Backup can enable robust data protection solution for businesses migrating and hosting applications on Azure file share. Security: Protection against Ransomware Ransomware or malware attack, continues to be a major threat to organizations worldwide, often leaving businesses at the mercy of cybercriminals demanding hefty ransom payments in exchange for access to their encrypted data. Vaulted backups provide a vital line of defense, ensuring that organizations can recover their data without giving in to ransom demands. Key features offered by vaulted Backups which protects against Ransomware: Isolation: Vaulted Backup data is isolated from your production storage accounts and stored in a separate tenant managed by Microsoft. This isolation helps safeguard your data against unauthorized tampering and ensures that your backups remain intact. Advanced security: Features like vault lock, multi-user authorization, and soft delete, which add additional layers of protection, ensuring that backups are immune to malicious deletion or tampering. Governance and security posture: Azure Backup integrates with the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) security posture, allowing you to better manage and govern the security of your backups. This ensures that your backups meet the right level of protection and are recoverable when you need them most. Regulatory and compliance Azure File share enables users from industries like legal, finance, and health to store crucial business data. To comply with regulations and compliance checks, one will require offsite backups with long-term retention, which snapshots alone couldn't provide. With vaulted backup users can move snapshots to a Recovery Services Vault in the same Azure region as their primary storage, with options for cross-regional replication. This setup allows backup data to be retained for up to 99 years in low-cost, highly secure, immutable storage, meeting regulatory and compliance requirements during audits and legal holds. Furthermore, with the introduction of the new cross-subscription backup capability, organizations can allocate backup data to dedicated subscriptions. This feature allows customers to consolidate all backups into a single subscription, enhancing cost management and ensuring independent access control. It enables organizations to retain control over their data protection strategy while ensuring that each department or project adheres to its specific regulatory and security requirements. Enterprise Ready Vaulted backup support now enables adherence to the widely accepted 3-2-1 backup rule for Azure files protection. Azure Backup is well integrated with Azure Business Continuity Center that can offer centralized management to gain visibility, monitor jobs, alerts and reporting. How does 3-2-1 backup help? Human errors, insider threats, or stolen credentials can lead to critical data loss. File share snapshots serve as the first line of defense to restore your data. In case, where snapshots are not available, Vaulted Backups, stored securely outside of your primary storage account, provide an additional protected copy of your data. Additionally, the copy of the backup can be replicated to another region using GRS Geo-Redundant storage. A backup policy will enable you to manage the schedule and retention for both snapshots and vault copies. In the event of deletion whether accidental or malicious the restore process will first be initiated using snapshots. If snapshots are unavailable, recovery will proceed from the vault. If the primary region is down then one can restore from the secondary region with Cross Region restore option Getting started Here are three simple steps to help you get started with configuring vaulted backup for Azure File shares: Create a Recovery services vault: A vault is a management entity that stores backups and allows you to access and manage them. Create a backup policy: Backup policy enables you to configure the frequency and retention of backups based on your business requirements. Select the storage account and File shares to backup: You can choose to back up all File share or select specific File shares from the selected storage account depending on the criticality of the data they contain. Learn more about vaulted backup for File share here. Pricing and availability Vaulted backup for Azure File share standard is generally available in these regions. Vaulted backup for premium file shares will continue to be in public preview. You will incur a protected instance fee and charges for backup storage for both standard and premium shares from 1 st April 2025. To learn about pricing, refer to the Azure File share backup pricing page. Contact us If you have questions or feedback, please reach out to us at AskAzureBackupTeam@microsoft.com.Introducing new Storage Capabilities to Copilot in Azure (Preview)
We are excited to announce that customers can now take advantage of new Copilot in Azure (Public Preview) capabilities for Storage services. Copilot in Azure is an intelligent assistant designed to help you design, operate, optimize and troubleshoot your Azure environment. With the new Storage capabilities, Copilot in Azure can analyze your storage services metadata and logs to streamline and enhance tasks such as building cloud solutions, managing, operating, supporting, and troubleshooting cloud applications in Azure Storage. Troubleshooting Disk Performance with Copilot in Azure Available now in Public Preview Azure offers a rich variety of Disk metrics, providing insights into the performance of your Virtual Machine (VM) and Disk. These metrics help you diagnose performance issues when your application requires higher performance than what you have configured for the VM and Disks. Whether you are looking to set up and validate a new environment in Azure, or are facing issues with your existing set-up, Copilot further enhances your experience by analyzing these metrics to troubleshoot performance issues on-behalf of you, along with providing guided recommendations for optimizing the VM and disks performance to improve the experience for your application. To troubleshoot performance issues with Copilot in Azure, navigate to Copilot in the Azure Portal and enter a prompt related to VM-Disk performance, such as “Why is my Disk slow?”. Copilot will then ask you to specify the VM and Disk(s) experiencing performance issues, along with the relevant time period. Using this information, you can use Copilot to analyze your current VM-Disk configuration and performance metrics to identify whether your application is experiencing slowness due to reaching the configured performance limits for the VM or Disk. It will then provide a summary of the analysis and a set of recommended actions to resolve your performance issue, which you can apply directly in the Portal through Copilot’s guided recommendations. By leveraging the power of Copilot, you can efficiently diagnose and address performance issues within your Azure Disks environment. For more information on the Disk Performance Copilot capability, refer to the Public Documentation. Managing Storage Lifecycle Management with Copilot in Azure Available now in Public Preview With Copilot in Azure, we're providing a more efficient way to manage and optimize your storage costs. Copilot in Azure allows you to save on costs by tiering blobs that haven't been accessed or modified for a while. In some cases, you might even decide to delete those blobs. With Copilot in Azure, you can simply automate lifecycle management (LCM) rule authoring, enabling you to perform bulk actions on Storage accounts through a natural language interface. This means no more manual rule creation or risk of misconfiguration! To use this capability, simply enter a prompt related to cost management, such as “Help me reduce my storage account costs” or “I want to lower my storage costs.” Copilot will then guide you through authoring an LCM rule to help you achieve your goals. For more information on the Storage Lifecycle Management Copilot capability, refer to the Public Documentation. Troubleshoot File Sync errors with Copilot in Azure Available now in Public Preview With Copilot in Azure, you can now quickly troubleshoot and resolve common Azure File Sync issues, such as network misconfiguration, incorrect RBAC permissions, or accidental file share deletions. Copilot in Azure detects errors and misconfigurations, provides exact steps to fix them, and can act on your behalf to resolve common errors. To use this capability, simply enter a prompt related to File Sync such as “Why are my files not syncing?” or “Help me troubleshoot error 0x80C83096.” With the File Sync errors troubleshooting skill, Copilot in Azure acts as your intelligent assistant to keep your File Sync environment running smoothly. This capability not only saves you time by cutting down on troubleshooting efforts but also empowers you to resolve issues confidently and independently. For more information on the Files Sync Copilot capability, refer to the Public Documentation.
Reduce latency and enhance resilience with Azure Files zonal placement
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. 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.
