On its Azure cloud, Microsoft has developed a cold storage service, which provides a low-cost storage option for data that isn't accessed frequently.

Microsoft's announcement is a response to its major public cloud competitors, who have offered cold-storage alternatives for some time. Amazon's Glacier service debuted in 2012, and Google's Cloud Storage Nearline option debuted last year.

The underlying idea behind cold storage is that while much of the data that people and businesses generate is accessed infrequently, it doesn't require the same level of availability and access speed as important applications. As a result, the data center infrastructure created to hold it may be less expensive than core cloud infrastructure, with the savings passed on to the customer in the case of a cloud provider.

Cool Blob Storage is Microsoft's new service, and it costs $0.01 to $0.048 per GB per month, depending on the area and total amount of data stored. The "Hot" Blob storage tier costs $0.0223 to $0.061 per GB, thus customers who choose the "Cool" access tier will be able to save more than 50% on the cost of storing some of their data in Microsoft's cloud.

Microsoft's Azure cloud has announced a cold storage service, which provides a low-cost storage option for data that isn't accessed frequently.

Microsoft's announcement is a late response to its largest public cloud competitors, who have offered cold storage for some time. Amazon's Glacier service was launched in 2012, and Google's Cloud Storage Nearline service was released last year.

The underlying idea behind cold storage is that while much of the data that people and businesses generate is accessed infrequently, it doesn't require the same level of availability and access speed as important applications. As a result, the data center infrastructure created to hold it may be less expensive than core cloud infrastructure, with the savings passed on to the customer in the case of a cloud provider.

For quite some time, web-scale data center operators of the caliber of Microsoft have been looking at ways to save infrastructure costs by better aligning equipment expenditure with the sort of data being stored.

Microsoft has kept the architecture underpinning its new cold storage service under wraps. However, in 2014, it published a paper detailing Pelican, a core building element for an exascale cold storage system.

According to Microsoft, Pelican is a rack-scale storage device created exclusively for cold storage in the cloud. It's a "converged design," which means that everything was built to function together, from mechanical systems to hardware and software.

When the study was published, Pelican's max sustained read rate per 1PB of storage was 1GB per second, and it could store more than 5PB in a single rack, meaning an entire rack's data could be transferred out in 13 days. Microsoft may already have a next-generation cold storage design with increased throughput and capacity.

In order to get the best out of the both storages i.e., the regular-access Cool Blob Storage and the hot blob storage in terms of latency and throughput, the Hot Blob Storage performs similarly. In a recent blog post, Sriprasad Bhat, senior program manager for Azure Storage, has verified this information.

The Cool access tier guarantees 99.9% availability, while the Hot access tier ensures 99.9%.

In order to get improved availability of the data it repeats the data which significantly helps the Microsoft to provide a 99.9% uptime SLA for Cold access versus 99.99 percent for the Hot access tier if we use the RA-GRS redundancy option.

For this reason, the social network constructed and built separate data centers near its core server farms in Oregon and North Carolina.

These cold storage facilities are specially designed and maintained without any redundant electrical infrastructure or backup generators.

The design of these kind of data centres has resulted in a very huge energy and equipment cost savings which were based on the architecture build by Facebook's infrastructure team.

They've been working on strategies to assist us manage the expense of storing data in the cloud because it's rising at an exponential rate. Tiering our data depending on criteria like frequency of access, retention term, and so on is a key part of managing storage expenses.

Cool data is a common tier of consumer data that is accessed infrequently but requires similar latency and performance as hot data.

Backups, media material, scientific data, compliance, and archive data are all examples of cool storage use cases. Any of the data which is not daily accessed by the organisation and we want to keep it just in case we need that data in a very long time, so we can keep all these type of data in the cold storage.

We also have a feature where we can choose between Hot and Cool access tiers in order to store the object data which will be totally based on its access behaviour using the new Blob storage accounts.

Blob storage accounts provide the following features:

• Performance
• Cost effective
• Compatibility
• Availability
• Durability
• Scalability and Security
• Global reach

Apart from the Azure Portal or the PowerShell portal, for managing Blob storage accounts, we can also use the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer which can be used to manage data in the storage account and this is a GUI based portal and is very easy to use.

Some of organisation which are 3^rd party organisations have provided updates on their support for Cool storage:

• Commvault: For the enterprise data management we can use this software product from Commvault which is a Windows/Azure-centric solution.Microsoft enhances their Azure offering once again with this new Cool Storage product, and we anticipate that this service will be a key driver of new prospects for both Commvault and Microsoft.
• Veritas: Veritas NetBackupTM, the market leader, protects enterprise data on a worldwide scale in terms of administration and performance - for any workload, on any storage device, and in any location. Go to the NetBackup 8.0 Beta registration and download page by clicking here.
• SoftNAS: SoftNASTM® will enable Azure Cool storage in the near future.
  Customers will be able to use SoftNAS Cloud NAS with Azure Cool storage as a cost-effective solution to escalating storage expenses by the summer of 2016. SoftNAS enables customers to migrate to the cloud without having to change their apps, while also providing enterprise-class NAS features like as de-duplication, compression, directory integration, encryption, snapshotting, and more.
• Cohesity: Cohesity is the first hyper-converged storage system for enterprise data in the world. Cohesity unifies scattered, inefficient secondary storage islands into a limitless, infinitely expanding storage platform that may be used on-premises or in the cloud.
  The Long-term data preservation and archive, tiering of infrequently accessed data onto the cloud, and disaster recovery replication are the three main use cases where the Cohesity platform can easily & smoothly integrate with the Azure cool storages.
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• CloudBerry Lab: It is a tool for Microsoft's Azure backup. Before the data leaves the computer, it compresses and encrypts it with a password specified by the user. Data then sends it to the cloud in a secure manner, either on a schedule or in real time. CloudBerry Backup also includes file-system and image-based backup, as well as compatibility for SQL Server and MS Exchange, as well as customizable retention settings and incremental backup. According to the now information's available in order to store the backup data, the CloudBerry Backup is now available and it now supports Azure Blob storage accounts as well.