As enterprises move more workloads to the cloud, the stakes for availability, data protection, and data security have never been higher. Industries like financial services, healthcare, government, retail, and global enterprises now demand cloud architectures that can withstand disruptions, eliminate downtime, and meet strict regulatory requirements all without adding complexity.
But one of the hardest challenges in cloud architecture hasn’t changed: how to balance high availability, consistent performance, and in-region data residency requirements without creating a maze of operational overhead. Traditional approaches to zone redundancy often force teams to assemble complex architectures with duplicate volumes, custom failover scripts, or cross-zone replication that adds latency and cost. These solutions can work but they are rarely simple, efficient, or aligned with the expectation that cloud services should “just work.”
That’s what makes Azure NetApp Files’ Elastic zone-redundant storage service level (Elastic ZRS) such a meaningful advancement. Now in public preview, Elastic ZRS is a new service (with different capabilities from the existing ANF service levels) that delivers cloud native, multi‑AZ resilience with shared QoS at the pool level, maintaining low single‑digit millisecond latency and ensuring zero RPO for cross‑zone high availability without requiring complex cloud storage manipulation or compromising overall performance.
Why Customers Need a Better Option
Cloud architects consistently point to a set of recurring challenges when trying to build resilient applications within a single Azure region.
- Eliminating Single Zone Vulnerabilities - Applications running in a single availability zone remain exposed if that zone experiences a disruption. Even rare incidents can cascade into major business impacts. Customers need built‑in, infrastructure‑level resilience that ensures a zonal failure doesn’t result in downtime or data loss.
- Reducing the Complexity of DIY High Availability - Managing redundant infrastructure, coordinating replication, and maintaining failover scripts consumes valuable engineering time. It increases operational overhead and slows innovation. Customers want simple, built‑in resilience not another custom solution they have to maintain.
- Minimizing Downtime and Its Business Impact - For many organizations, even a few minutes of downtime carry real financial risk from missed transactions and customer churn to reputational damage. Teams need a solution designed for virtually uninterrupted operations.
Introducing Elastic ZRS: A New Approach to High Availability
Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS tackles these challenges head on by delivering a fully integrated, multi-AZ high availability storage experience designed for modern cloud environments.
- High Resiliency - Elastic ZRS synchronously mirrors every write across multiple availability zones within the region committing data everywhere before acknowledging the operation. This architecture delivers true zero data loss (zero RPO). If a zonal outage occurs, failover is completely automatic and transparent, requiring no changes to your applications.
- Near Zero Data Loss Failover—With Zero Complexity - Because the platform handles failover natively, your storage endpoint never changes. Applications and stateful Kubernetes workloads continue running without interruption. There’s no need for manual scripts, custom failover logic, or operational overhead.
- Enterprise Data Management - Elastic ZRS supports the same enterprise grade features: NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB, snapshots, cloning, encryption, and Azure Backup integration as the other ANF service levels.
- Optimized Throughput and Metadata Speed - By intelligently allocating QoS at the pool level and optimizing metadata performance across zones, Elastic ZRS supports metadata intensive workloads such as applications managing large numbers of small files.
Where Elastic ZRS Delivers Immediate Benefits
- Corporate File Shares - User directories, team shares, and enterprise content remain accessible without interruption ensuring productivity doesn’t take a hit.
- Financial Services and Trading Systems - With strict requirements around uptime, compliance, and consistency, financial platforms benefit from nonstop operations and zero‑loss resilience.
- Regulated and Business Critical Workloads - Elastic ZRS ensures nonstop access to essential applications like compliance apps even if an AZ fails as data stays online with zero outages or lost transactions.
- Kubernetes and Containerized Applications - Stateful apps gain synchronized data protection and automated zone failover critical for modern cloud native environments.
A Simpler, More Resilient Future
Azure NetApp Files Elastic ZRS marks a major step forward in how organizations can build resilient, in-region cloud architectures. It blends Azure’s robust infrastructure with NetApp’s proven enterprise storage capabilities to provide always-on, multi-AZ resiliency that’s simple, fast, and efficient.
For leaders looking to modernize mission critical platforms while reducing operational overhead, Elastic ZRS offers a clear path forward: unified resilience, predictable performance, and turnkey operations built for mission critical workloads platforms while reducing operational overhead.
Explore more:
- Blog: Enhanced storage resiliency with Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant service
- Understand Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage service level
- Quick Bytes: Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage service level
- How-to: Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone-redundant storage service level