Geo-redundant storage keeps six copies in total: three locally redundant in the primary region and three in the paired region. The secondary copy can be read only once a failover has happened.
Also called geo-redundant storage.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
AZ-305AZ-104AZ-900DP-900AZ-802
Each book explains GRS in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- region
A provider-defined grouping in VCF Automation of Supervisors that all share one NSX Local Manager; tenants consume its compute, storage and memory via quotas set per region.
- Paired region
A region linked with another in the same geography so updates are rolled out in sequence and recovery is prioritised. It is the typical disaster recovery target, though pairing does not trigger failover automatically.
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
Related terms
- Backup storage redundancy
Replication choice for a Recovery Services vault (GRS unless you pick LRS or ZRS). Set it before protecting the first item, because it is locked once backup has been configured.
- Customer-managed account failover
Makes the secondary of a geo-redundant storage account the new primary while keeping its DNS names. A planned failover preserves geo-redundancy, whereas after an unplanned one the account stays LRS until you set up geo-replication again.
- RA-GRS
Geo-redundant storage with an extra read-only endpoint in the secondary region that can be read from without a failover.
- Redundancy
So that hardware failures, datacentre outages or a regional disaster cannot destroy data, Azure Storage keeps multiple copies: only in the primary region with LRS and ZRS, or in a secondary region as well with GRS and GZRS.
- Region pair
Microsoft links two regions, normally within one geography, so they back each other up for geo-replication such as GRS, get platform updates at different times and are prioritised in recovery. Customers can't pick their pair, and many recent regions have no partner.
- Secondary region
Holds disaster-recovery copies of data or workloads, typically hundreds of miles away from the primary location. Geo-redundant storage always uses the primary's pair for this, with no option to change it.