What's the best way configuring storage accounts for a US coast to coast organization

Question

We are a nationwide company in US, and we created an storage account to be used as a file server for the organization, it is located in the US East 2, with Zone-redundant storage (ZRS). But people in the West Coast offices are experiencing a very slow speed accessing the files. Is the Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) the solution or we need to create a resource in the US West 2 or 3 location? It's not only for create redundancy in case of interruptions but also to provide the users with the best speed accessing the files from any place in US.

Answer 1

@Damian Ramos Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A. I understand that you want to know how to setup your File servers so that both the US East and US West locations can access it.

With GRS or GZRS, the data in the secondary region isn't available for read or write access unless there is a failover to the secondary region. For read access to the secondary region, you configure your storage account to use read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS). However, this option is not available for Azure Files.

Therefore, as you mentioned, these options are only for redundancy, and you cannot use it for other purpose at the moment. However, you can use Azure File Sync to have faster access to data. Here are more details regarding Azure File Sync explained in this video.

"Azure File Sync is a service that allows you to cache several Azure file shares on an on-premises Windows Server or cloud VM."

Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any further questions and we will be glad to assist you further. Thank you!

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