Storage account Redundancy change impact

Hi parveen,

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When looking to save costs on your Azure Storage account, adjusting the redundancy setting from Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) to Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) is a practical option. Switching to LRS can lower expenses, but it’s important to understand how this impacts your data protection and availability.

Impact of changing from RA-GRS to LRS:

Data Replication: RA-GRS (Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage) stores your data three times within the primary region (synchronously), and also makes an additional copy in a geographically distant secondary region (asynchronously), which you can read from. LRS (Locally Redundant Storage), on the other hand, only stores your data within a single data center in one region, also replicated three times—but all within that one location.

Durability and Availability: With LRS, your data is protected only from hardware failures in that local data center. It doesn’t protect you from broader issues like natural disasters or region-wide outages. RA-GRS offers higher durability because it protects your data across two separate regions.

Read Access to Secondary Region: RA-GRS gives you read access to your data in the secondary region if the primary one goes down. Switching to LRS means losing this fallback option.

Cost: LRS is more budget-friendly. It’s the cheapest redundancy option and works well when cost matters more than geographic redundancy or maximum durability.

Replication Data Loss: If you move from RA-GRS to LRS, any data stored in the secondary region gets deleted as part of the change.

Billing: If you switch from RA-GRS to LRS, the account is billed at the RA-GRS rate for an additional 30 days after the change.

No Downtime: Changing redundancy options does not cause application downtime or data loss during migration, and existing data remains accessible throughout the process.

When to use LRS:

If your application data can be easily reconstructed or you have other backup/disaster recovery strategies.

If data residency regulations require replication within a single region.

To reduce storage costs when geo-redundancy is not critical.

How to change redundancy from RA-GRS to LRS (Step by Step):

You can change the redundancy through the Azure portal, PowerShell, or Azure CLI:

Using Azure Portal

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. Navigate to your Storage account.
3. Under Settings, select Data management > Redundancy.
4. From the Redundancy options, select Locally-redundant storage (LRS).
5. Click Save to apply the change.

References for further reading

• Change how a storage account is replicated: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/redundancy-migration
• Data redundancy - Azure Storage: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy
• Changing Azure Storage redundancy configuration: FAQs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy-change-faq

Please do let me know if you have any questions on this.

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Thanks,

Harish.