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Azure provides five main storage products: Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Table Storage, and Disk Storage. Each has a different pricing structure with costs per GB stored, data transfer costs, and charges for data operations.
In this post, we’ll briefly review these storage service, explain each pricing model, and provide pricing examples for common scenarios, as part of our series of articles about Azure cost management. We’ll also show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help you reduce storage costs on Azure.
In this article, you will learn:
- Introduction to Azure Storage services
- Azure Blob Storage pricing
- Azure Files pricing
- Azure table storage pricing
- Azure managed disks pricing
- Azure NetApp Files Pricing
- Reducing Azure storage costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Introduction to Azure Storage Services
The following table summarizes Azure’s storage options. In the following sections we’ll provide pricing details for each service.
|
Azure Service |
What it Provides |
Use Cases |
|
Azure Blob Storage |
Elastic object storage |
Unstructured data such as images, documents, video, audio, and data stored for backup, disaster recovery and archiving purposes. |
|
Azure Files |
Managed file shares that can be mounted by Azure VMs or on-premise machines |
Life-and-shift migration of legacy applications to Azure, shared home directory, storing configuration files for multiple VMs, logs and metrics. |
|
Azure Tables |
Provided as part of the Cosmos DB service, a NoSQL throughput-optimized data store with automatic secondary indexes. |
Structured, non-relational data such as databases that don’t use joins or foreign keys, clustered search indexes, data that needs to be accessed via OData protocol and LINQ queries. |
|
Managed Disks |
Azure Managed Disks are Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) that attach to azure VMs to provide persistent storage. |
Low-latency persistent storage for VMs. |
|
Azure NetApp Files |
Migrate enterprise file applications to Azure with no code changes. Supports multiple file protocols including NFS and SMB. |
Can support POSIX-compliant workloads that need shared file storage. Suitable for static web content, file shares, database and database backups, enterprise apps, analytics, and performance-intensive apps. |
Also refer to our in-depth articles about Azure SQL pricing ,which explains service options and pricing models for Azure’s Microsoft SQL Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, and our article about Azure backup pricing, which explains the cost of backup storage on Azure Blob Storage, with an emphasis on using storage tiering to conserve costs.
Azure Blob Storage Pricing
Azure block blob storage is priced according to several factors:
- How much data you store
- Duration of data storage (prices defined per GB-month)
- Operations performed on the data
- Data redundancy options
- Storage tier—premium (high throughput), hot (99.9% availability), cool (accessed at least once per month), archive (stored for at least 180 days, can tolerate retrieval latency)
- On-demand vs. reserved storage (you can reserve blob storage for 1-3 years and receive discounts)
Azure pricing is subject to frequent changes, and below we show only the most common pricing options. For full, updated pricing please consult the official pricing page.
Below you can see on-demand storage prices for the West US 2 region, for three common redundancy options:
- Locally redundant storage (LRS)—11 9’s of durability within one Azure datacenter
- Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS)—12 9’s of durability, replicated across three AZs
- Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)—16 9’s of durability, replicated across three AZs in primary and secondary region, with failover
|
Redundancy Option |
Premium Tier |
Hot Tier |
Cool Tier |
Archive Tier |
|
LRS |
$0.15 / GB |
$0.0184 / GB (first 50TB) $0.0177 / GB (51-500 TB) $0.0170 / GB (500+ TB) |
$0.01 / GB |
$0.00099 / GB |
|
ZRS |
N/A |
$0.023 / GB (first 50TB) $0.0221 / GB (51-500 TB) $0.0212 / GB (500+ TB) |
$0.0125 / GB |
N/A |
|
GRS |
N/A |
$0.0368 / GB (first 50TB) $0.0354 / GB (51-500 TB) $0.0339 / GB (500+ TB) |
$0.02 / GB |
$0.00299 / GB |
In addition, Azure Blob Storage charges for data transfer:
- Data retrieval is free for the hot tier, and costs $0.01 for cool data tier and $0.02 for archive data tier, across most redundancy options.
- Data writes are free for all tiers and redundancy options.
For more pricing options and to gain a deeper understanding of Blog Storage tiers and redundancy options, read our in-depth article: Azure Blog Storage Pricing.
Azure Files Pricing
Azure Files Pricing depends on the following factors:
- Quantity of data stored
- Duration of data storage (prices defined per GB-month)
- Operations performed on the data
- Data redundancy options
- Storage tier—premium (high throughput, served on SSD drive) or standard
The following table shows Azure Files data storage prices for the West US 2 region.
|
Redundancy Option |
Premium Tier |
Normal Tier |
|
LRS |
$0.24 |
$0.06 |
|
ZRS |
N/A |
$0.075 |
|
GRS |
N/A |
$0.10 |
In the Premium Tier, you don’t pay for storage actually used, but for storage provisioned. You define the amount of storage to provision, and Azure Files provides IOPS and throughput appropriate for the share size. To learn more about the provisioned IOPS model see the official pricing page.
Snapshot storage is priced separately. For LRS redundancy, snapshot storage costs $0.20 per provisioned GB for the premium tier and $0.06 for the normal tier.
Data operations are charged as follows, for LRS redundancy:
- $0.015 for 10,000 put, create container, or list operations
- $0.0015 for all other operations except delete
- No charge for delete operations or geo-replication data transfer
Azure Table Storage Pricing
Azure Table Storage is priced based on GB-month used, depending on your selected redundancy level. Pricing is shown for West US 2 region (see the official pricing page for up-to-date prices).
|
Redundancy Option |
Cost Per GB-Month |
|
LRS |
$0.045 |
|
ZRS |
$0.06 |
|
GRS |
$0.075 |
|
RA-GRS |
$0.0562 |
|
ZRS |
$0.0438 |
|
GZRS |
$0.0544 |
Data operations and data transfer is charged at $0.00036 per 10,000 transactions.
Azure Managed Disk Pricing
Azure Managed Disks are priced according to the following criteria:
- Disk category—Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Ultra Disk (next generation SSD with configurable performance and low latency)
- Disk size—disks are charged for their entire capacity, not actual usage
- Data transactions—a charge per 10,000 transactions on a disk
- Data redundancy options
Most disks offer limited IOPS and throughput, depending on the disk category
A few examples of monthly costs for managed disks, for LRS redundancy, in West US 2 region.
|
Disk Category |
Disk Type and Size |
Monthly Cost |
Cost for 10,000 Data Transactions |
|
Premium SSD |
P30, 1TB |
$122.88 |
N/A |
|
Standard SSD |
E30, 1TB |
$76.80 |
$0.002 |
|
Standard HHD |
S30, 1TB |
$40.96 |
$0.0005 |
|
Ultra Disk |
512 GB |
$118.08 |
Per-hour, per-GB charges for provisioned IOPS and throughput |
See the official pricing page for updated pricing, and to understand how IOPS and throughput provisioning works for the Ultra Disk category.
Azure NetApp Files Pricing
Azure NetApp Files is priced according to the three performance tiers:
- Standard Tier - suitable for static web content, file shares, database backups
- Premium Tier - suitable for databases, enterprise apps, analytics, messaging queues
- Ultra Tier - performance-intensive applications including high performance computing (HPC)
Pricing is based on the amount of storage used, priced per GB per hour across the three tiers.
| Performance Tier | Price / GB / Hour |
|
Standard Storage |
$0.000202 |
|
Premium Storage |
$0.000403 |
|
Ultra Storage |
$0.000538 |
Reducing Azure Storage Costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides storage efficiencies, including thin provisioning, data compression, and deduplication, reducing the storage footprint and costs for Azure storage service by up to 70%.
