Optimize object storage costs automatically with smart tier—now generally available

Smart tier optimises how your data is stored, helping to ensure that your storage costs match what you actually use.

We’re thrilled to share that smart tier is now generally available (GA) for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage! This fully managed, automated tiering feature streamlines how you manage storage costs without needing ongoing operational involvement. By continually optimising data placement, smart tier aligns your expenses with your real usage.

As data environments grow and access behaviours change, managing lifecycle rules can become complicated. Many users find that automated, continuous tiering is essential to keep costs in check.

Smart tier looks at your data access habits and automatically moves items between the hot, cool, and cold tiers, ensuring your costs reflect actual usage—all without manual setup.

Since we introduced the public preview of smart tier at Ignite in November 2025, many customers and partners have embraced it. In fact, over 50% of the capacity managed by smart tier has automatically transferred to cooler tiers based on real access patterns:

Adopting smart tier for our Azure Data Explorer (ADX) clusters has brought us noticeable advantages. By wisely placing data in the most cost-effective places based on actual usage, we can manage storage costs without compromising performance. Hot data is always available for queries, while cooler data shifts to lower-cost tiers automatically. Smart tier takes the guesswork out of optimising storage, allowing us to prioritise delivering insights over managing data placement.

Brad Watts, Principal PM for Azure Data Explorer

The ecosystem of partners for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage is also integrating smart tier into their offerings:

Smart tier is a groundbreaking step towards simplifying how businesses optimise storage in the cloud. Automating tiering while ensuring resilience and predictable costs works seamlessly alongside Qumulo’s data services on Azure. Our partnership with Microsoft is helping customers modernise their file workloads on Azure, cutting down on operational complexity and boosting long-term cost efficiency.

Brandon Whitelaw, SVP and Head of Product at Qumulo

Smart tier is now generally available in almost all zonal public cloud regions, supporting both Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage.

How Smart Tier Decides on Data Placement

Smart tier constantly checks the last access time for each object in your storage account where it’s enabled.

Frequently accessed data remains in the hot tier, supporting performance and transaction efficiency. Inactive data moves to the cool tier after 30 days and the cold tier after another 60 days. If data is accessed again, it automatically shifts back to hot, restarting the cycle. This ensures your datasets are always in the most cost-effective tier without requiring you to predict access patterns.

Operations like Get Blob or Put Blob restart the tiering cycle. However, some operations, such as Get Blob Properties, do not affect transitions. These tiering rules are built into the service, ensuring automatic optimisation with no manual upkeep.

Setting Up Smart Tier

Enabling smart tier is designed to be simple, minimising the need for change management while offering instant cost-saving benefits:

1. When creating a storage account, just select smart tier as the default access tier via the account configuration for any storage account with zonal redundancy. You can do this through both the API and the Azure portal.
2. Activate for existing accounts with zonal redundancy by changing the blob access tier from default to smart using the same tools.
3. Once enabled, let Azure work its magic: Objects inheriting the default tier are automatically managed with no manual intervention.

Please note: Smart tier is not compatible with legacy account types like Standard general-purpose v1 (GPv1) and doesn’t apply to page or append blobs.

With smart tier, you pay standard rates for hot, cool, and cold capacities without extra charges for tier transitions or early deletions. Moving existing objects into smart tier won’t incur tier-change fees; only a monitoring fee will apply to cover the orchestration.

Over time, the automated movement of inactive data together with smart tier’s simplified billing could lead to substantial savings.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Smart Tier

• After enabling smart tier, you can pin objects you want to keep in specific tiers. There will be no monitoring fee for these.
• Don’t exclude small objects. Items under 128 KiB stay in the hot tier and won’t incur the monitoring fee. However, if an object grows beyond this size, smart tier policies will automatically apply.
• Avoid trying to manipulate tiering behaviour using lifecycle rules, as they may interfere with smart tier’s management.

Customers that have enabled smart tier often see the following benefits:

Smart Tier Benefits for Large Analytics Operations

During its public preview, a major data analytics customer utilised smart tier for hundreds of tebibytes of telemetry and log data with various access patterns.

Before adopting smart tier, this customer depended on customised lifecycle rules that became cumbersome as access patterns changed. They often faced unexpected cost spikes when data was re-accessed.

After implementing smart tier:

• More than half of the managed data has automatically shifted to cooler tiers based on access.
• The team completely eliminated lifecycle policy management, freeing up engineering resources.
• Storage costs became more predictable and resilient to spikes in access since rehydration is automatic without any retrieval or early deletion charges.

While savings may differ based on the workload, this case illustrates how smart tier aligns storage costs with actual usage.

Who Should Consider Using Smart Tier?

Smart tier is ideal for organisations that:

• Manage large or rapidly growing data collections.
• Have mixed, changing, or unpredictable access patterns.
• Want to reduce costs without managing lifecycle rules.
• Need data to remain online and immediately accessible, even if it’s not accessed often.
• Need to mitigate potential billing spikes from unexpected rehydration of cooler-tier data.

This includes analytics pipelines, data lakes, logs, telemetry, and application data where usage tends to vary.

Reasons to Enable Smart Tier Now

• Lower operational overhead: No need to design, test, or maintain lifecycle rules.
• Align costs with genuine usage: Data is continually moved to the appropriate tier based on access behaviour.
• Maintain performance: Frequently accessed data remains hot; re-access is automatic.
• Simplify billing: No tier transition, early deletion, or retrieval charges apply within smart tier; only a monthly monitoring fee is involved.
• Scale with confidence: Designed for accommodating large, evolving data estates.

What’s Next for Smart Tier?

Smart tier is built as a foundational feature that will keep evolving. Future updates will focus on:

• Wider regional availability, including more public cloud regions as the GA rollout progresses.
• Support for client tools: Stay tuned for upcoming releases of our Storage SDKs and tools to support this capability.

How to Get Started with Smart Tier

You can enable smart tier when creating a storage account or update an existing zonal storage account by selecting smart tier as the default access tier. Once it’s enabled, Azure will automatically optimise your data placement—no ongoing adjustments necessary.