Question

Difficulty: HardAzure Storage Accounts, Blob, Disk, Files, and Storage Tiers

A retail organization stores daily transaction logs in an Azure Blob storage container. These logs must be retained for five years to meet regulatory compliance standards. While the logs are rarely accessed, any retrieval request must be processed immediately to resolve customer disputes. To minimize storage costs, an IT administrator proposes modifying the lifecycle management policy to transition the logs to the Archive access tier immediately after creation. Which of the following statements correctly evaluates the administrator's proposal?

  1. The proposal is invalid because data in the Archive tier is stored offline and cannot be read immediately, as it requires several hours to rehydrate to the Hot or Cool tier.Answer
  2. B
    The proposal is valid because the Archive tier offers the lowest storage costs and supports immediate, low-latency read access for individual blobs under 10 MB.
  3. C
    The proposal is invalid because managing storage tiers is an IaaS responsibility, meaning the organization must deploy and maintain virtual machines to host the storage servers.
  4. D
    The proposal is valid because Azure Lifecycle Management automatically and instantly rehydrates archived blobs to the Hot tier when a read request is initiated.

Answer

The proposal is invalid because data in the Archive tier is stored offline and cannot be read immediately, as it requires several hours to rehydrate to the Hot or Cool tier.
The correct option is that the proposal is invalid because data in the Archive tier is offline and requires several hours to rehydrate. The Archive access tier offers the lowest storage costs but does not support direct or immediate read operations. To read data, it must first be rehydrated to an online tier (Hot or Cool), which takes hours.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the business requirements for data access speed.
The scenario states that access to the transaction logs must be immediate when a dispute arises.
This establishes the latency requirement for retrieval operations.
2
Evaluate the technical characteristics of the Archive access tier.
The Archive access tier has the lowest storage costs but is an offline tier with retrieval latency of several hours (rehydration process).
This checks if the selected tier satisfies the access speed constraint determined in Step 1.
3
Compare the requirements against the characteristics of the Archive tier.
Since the Archive tier cannot meet the 'immediate' retrieval requirement, the proposal to move logs to this tier is invalid.
This determines the validity of the administrator's proposal.

Key Concept

Azure Blob Storage Access Tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) and Rehydration
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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