On April 28 2016, Microsoft released an option in Azure BLOB storage to select “Hot” and “Cool for long-term storage purposes.

Previously, there was no option to select them and the price plans only depended on the storage usage and the backup methods.

With the introduction to these options, you are now able to select the options more suited to your use and reduce storage costs.

 

Comparison of the plan

Plan Hot Cool
Storage Fee Higher Lower
Data Read Free Paid
Data Write Free Paid
SLA (Excluding RA-GRS) 99.9% 99%
SLA (RA-GRS) 99.99% 99.9%

 

The price as of May 2 2016 (Pay as you go, Japan East region) is as shown below:

Data Storage Cost LRS   GRS   RA-GRS  
(per GB) COOL HOT COOL HOT COOL HOT
First 100 TB /Month ¥1.53 ¥2.45 ¥3.06 ¥4.90 ¥3.83 ¥6.22
Next 900 TB /Month ¥1.53 ¥2.37 ¥3.06 ¥4.72 ¥3.83 ¥6.01
Next 4,000 TB / Month ¥1.53 ¥2.27 ¥3.06 ¥4.55 ¥3.83 ¥5.78

 

Transaction Cost LRS   GRS AND RA-GRS  
COOL HOT COOL HOT
Placing, listing BLOB and blocks, Creating Containers (per 10000) ¥10.20 ¥5.10 ¥20.40 ¥10.20
Other transactions except delete (per 10000) ¥1.02 ¥0.41 ¥1.02 ¥0.41
Data Read (per GB) ¥1.02 Free ¥1.02 Free
Data Write (per GB) ¥0.26 Free ¥0.51 Free
Geo-Replication Data Transfer (per GB) N/A N/A ¥9.18 ¥9.18

*See Microsoft website for the latest price plan.

 

Announcements

This is an extract from Microsoft Azure team blog article, “Introducing Azure cool storage”

Data in the cloud is growing at an exponential pace, and we have been working on ways to help you manage the cost of storing this data. An important aspect of managing storage costs is tiering your data based on attributes like frequency of access, retention period, etc. A common tier of customer data is cool data which is infrequently accessed but requires similar latency and performance to hot data.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Cool Blob Storage – low cost storage for cool object data. Example use cases for cool storage include backups, media content, scientific data, compliance and archival data. In general, any data which lives for a longer period of time and is accessed less than once a month is a perfect candidate for cool storage.

 

How to create a Cool Blob Storage

Go to Azure Portal, click on “New”, then “Data and Storage”, and select “Storage Account”.

 

Enter the name of the account and for deploy model, select “Resource Manager”.

Account type should be set to “BLOB storage”. Otherwise you cannot select the “Hot” and “Cool” options.

 

By changing the account type, “Access Level” can be selected to choose either “Hot” or “Cool”

情報元: https://azure.microsoft.com/ja-jp/blog/introducing-azure-cool-storage/