Can Azure Storage Geo-replication be used as a source?
I know Azure will geo-replicate a copy of the current storage account to a different location, my questions are: can I access a different location in the program, even just read only
I asked about this because it allowed me to create yet another deployment in different geolocations for performance and fault protection, as Azure did. For the current setup, if I use the same storage source in different geolocations, I have to pay for the extra bandwidth.
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You can only access your storage account by name. In the event of a failover, this name will be mapped to the alternate datacenter. You cannot directly access the Failover store, nor can you choose when to trigger failover. For a multisite installation, as you described, you will need to duplicate your data (which then adds the cost of storage in datacenter # 2). This gives you the most flexibility in your DR and performance scheduling, but with the added cost of storage and bandwidth (output only).
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Last week, the storage group announced read-only access to Fault Tolerance: "Windows Azure Storage Backup Options and Backed Up Backup".
This means that you can now deploy your application to a different datacenter, which can be used for a "full" failover (which means the storage will also be available there). Even if it's read-only, your application will remain online, but just in "degraded" mode.
Here are the steps that you can take with Traffic Manager: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/adding-failover-to-your-application-with-read-access-geo-redundant-storage-and-the- windows-azure-traffic-manager /
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