Optimize object storage costs automatically with smart tier—now generally available
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April 14, 2026
person
Aung Oo
domainazure
We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of smart tier for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage. Smart tier is a fully managed, automated tiering capability for Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage that helps optimize storage costs without ongoing operational effort. By continuously optimizing data placement, smart tier ensures your storage costs are aligned with actual usage.
As data estates expand and access patterns evolve, managing lifecycle rules at scale becomes complex. Customers need automated, continuous tiering to keep costs aligned with usage.
Smart tier continuously evaluates your data access patterns and automatically moves objects across the hot, cool, and cold tiers to keep your costs aligned with usage without manual configuration.
Since launching the public preview of smart tier at Ignite in November 2025, customers and partners have adopted it across a range of data estates and over 50% of smart-tier–managed capacity has automatically shifted to cooler tiers based on actual access patterns:
We see a significant and measurable benefit from adopting smart tier in Azure Storage for our Azure Data Explorer (ADX) clusters. By intelligently placing data in the most cost‑effective tier based on actual usage patterns, smart tier allows us to optimize storage spend without sacrificing performance. Hot data remains instantly accessible for query workloads, while cooler, less frequently accessed data is automatically shifted to lower‑cost tiers. Smart tier effectively removed the guesswork from storage optimization, enabling us to focus on delivering insights rather than managing data placement.
Smart Tier represents a major step forward in simplifying how enterprises optimize storage in the cloud. The ability to automate tiering while maintaining resilience and predictable economics is highly complementary to Qumulo’s data services on Azure. Together with Microsoft, we’re enabling customers to modernize file workloads on Azure while reducing operational complexity and improving long‑term cost efficiency.
Brandon Whitelaw, SVP and Head of Product at Qumulo
Smart tier continuously evaluates the last access time of each individual object on the storage account where smart tier is enabled.
Frequently accessed data stays in the hot tier to support performance and transaction efficiency; inactive data transitions to the cool tier after 30 days and to the cold tier after an additional 60 days. When data is accessed again, it is immediately promoted back to hot and the tiering cycle restarts. This means your datasets remain in the most cost-effective tier automatically, removing the need to predict access patterns.
Read and write operations against an object, i.e. Get Blob or Put Blob operations are restarting the tiering cycle. Metadata operations, i.e. Get Blob Properties, are not impacting transitions. These static tiering rules are part of the underlying service and ensure automatic optimizations without the need for manual maintenance.
Setting up smart tier
Enabling smart tier is straightforward and designed to minimize change management while delivering immediate cost-optimization benefits:
During storage account creation, just select smart tier as the default access tier through the storage account configuration for any storage account with zonal redundancy. This is supported both via API and the Azure portal.
Enable existing accounts with zonal redundancies by switching the blob access tier from default to smart through the same tooling.
Let Azure optimize automatically: Objects inheriting the default tier are continuously managed without manual interventions needed.
