Question

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

An organization is designing a disaster recovery strategy and needs to store backups of their server configurations. These backups will rarely be accessed, but in the event of a system failure, they must be restored as quickly as possible. A system administrator proposes storing these backup files in the Archive access tier of Azure Blob Storage to minimize ongoing storage costs. Which statement explains why the Archive access tier is unsuitable for this specific scenario?

  1. A
    Blobs in the Archive tier can be read directly using standard storage APIs, but their retrieval speed is throttled to a low transfer rate suitable only for background processes.
  2. Data in the Archive tier is offline and cannot be read directly; it must first be rehydrated to a warmer tier, which introduces a latency of several hours.Answer
  3. C
    To read data from the Archive tier, the customer must deploy and patch an intermediate Azure Virtual Machine gateway to handle the file system translation.
  4. D
    The Archive tier is exclusively designed for public cloud resources and cannot accept backups originating from on-premises private cloud environments.

Answer

Data in the Archive tier is offline and cannot be read directly; it must first be rehydrated to a warmer tier, which introduces a latency of several hours.
The Archive access tier is designed for data that is rarely accessed and can tolerate a retrieval latency of several hours. Because the data in this tier is stored offline, any attempt to read it directly will fail. To access the data, it must first be rehydrated to an online tier (Hot or Cool), which takes up to several hours depending on the chosen rehydration priority. Since the disaster recovery scenario requires files to be restored as quickly as possible, this latency makes the Archive tier inappropriate.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary constraint in the scenario.
The backups must be restored as quickly as possible in the event of a system failure.
This establishes the latency requirement for data retrieval.
2
Evaluate the access characteristics of the Archive tier in Azure Blob Storage.
Data in the Archive tier is offline and requires rehydration to a warmer tier (Hot or Cool) before it can be read, which takes several hours.
This identifies the latency mismatch between the Archive tier's behavior and the scenario's recovery requirement.
3
Select the option that correctly identifies this latency constraint.
The statement explaining that data in the Archive tier is offline and must be rehydrated, introducing a latency of several hours.
This matches the technical limitation of the Archive tier with the scenario's requirement.

Key Concept

Azure Storage Tiers and Rehydration Latency
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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