Azure cool blob storage now generally available in six new regions

Microsoft recently announced that Azure Blob storage accounts with hot and cool storage tiers are now generally available in six new regions: US East, US West, Germany Central, Germany Northeast, Australia Southeast and Brazil South.

Azure Storage now offers two storage tiers for Blob storage (object storage), so that you can store your data most cost-effectively depending on how you use it. The Azure hot storage tier is optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently. The Azure cool storage tier is optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed and long-lived. Data in the cool storage tier can tolerate a slightly lower availability, but still requires high durability and similar time to access and throughput characteristics as hot data. For cool data, slightly lower availability SLA and higher access costs are acceptable trade-offs for much lower storage costs.

Azure customers in the new regions can make use of the cost benefits of the cool storage tier for storing huge backup data, media content, scientific data, active archival data, etc,.