Priority retrieval and further enhancements for Azure Archive Storage hit GA

In recent Azure news, Microsoft unveiled new disk sizes and burst support for Premium SSD Managed Disks earlier this month. With regards to Archive Storage specifically, the tech giant introduced some new features for the service in public preview last year, along with a new redundancy type - Geo Zone Redundant Storage.

Today, the aforementioned capabilities have reached general availability. Namely, these include priority retrieval, Upload Blob Direct to Access tier, and enhancements for the Copy Blob API.

To start off, priority retrieval allows for quick rehydration of offline data. The process of converting offline archive tier data back to online hot or cool tiers may generally take a few hours. With the new capability, however, this can be done in less than an hour. The following two options are offered:

Standard priority is the default option for archive Set Blob Tier and Copy Blob requests, with retrievals taking up to 15 hours.

High priority fulfills the need for urgent data access from archive, with retrievals for blobs under 10 GB typically taking less than 1 hour.

Making use of priority retrieval requests will require users to pay slightly more though.

Moving on, Upload Blob Direct to Access tier enables the uploading of a blob directly to an access tier of choice using the 'PutBlob' or 'PutBlockList' APIs and the optional parameter x-ms-access-tier. This action bypasses an account's default access tier setting, making the uploading of objects to Azure Archive an efficient process.

And finally, the Copy Blob API has now been improved to support the copying of data from and to an archive access tier in the same storage account. Before copying a blob, the x-ms-rehydrate-priority can also be set if the blob that is being copied is currently situated in the archive tier. All of the features discussed are generally available in the updated versions of the Azure Portal, AzCopy, .NET Client Library, Java Client Library, Python Client Library, and Storage Services REST API starting today.