Tiered Storage
Tiered Storage
Disk type and storage type describe how data is technically stored. Tiered storage describes something else entirely: how often the data actually gets touched — and prices itself accordingly.
Tiered Storage
Data access frequency and retention are common ways of organizing storage requirements to balance cost and performance. Administrators describe storage tiers using the terms hot, warm, cold, and archive to reference access frequency — a cold tier is for rarely accessed content, hot tiers store frequently accessed data. Drag along the spectrum below.
Azure Blob Storage uses similar terms from the common industry descriptions, but anchors two of them to concrete ages:
Comparing hot, cool, and archive storage costs and capacities for Azure Blob Storage — note how sharply price drops moving right, in exchange for slower access:
| Data storage rates (pay-as-you-go) | Premium (per GB) | Hot (per GB) | Cool (per GB) | Cold (per GB) | Archive (per GB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First 50 TB / month | $0.15 | $0.018 | $0.01 | $0.00036 | $0.00099 |
| Next 450 TB / month | $0.15 | $0.0173 | $0.01 | $0.00036 | $0.00099 |
| Over 500 TB / month | $0.15 | $0.0166 | $0.01 | $0.00036 | $0.00099 |
Create VM storage. The steps to add storage to a virtual machine vary slightly by cloud service provider, but they involve similar information: selecting the VM and choosing storage configurations. Click through each step.