Examkin

Question

Difficulty: HardBlob, File, and Disk Storage Solutions

A financial services firm is migrating a critical core banking reporting application to Azure. The application runs on Azure Virtual Machines and requires a shared storage volume. The storage solution must meet the following requirements:

* Support concurrent read and write operations via the SMB protocol.
* Guarantee sub-millisecond read and write latency for highly transactional file metadata updates.
* Ensure that the data remains fully writeable and accessible even if a single Azure datacenter (Availability Zone) within the primary region suffers a total outage.
* Authenticate file access using the firm's on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).

Which storage solution should you recommend?

  1. An Azure Files Premium tier share deployed on a Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) storage accountAnswer
  2. B
    An Azure Files Premium tier share deployed on a Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) storage account
  3. C
    An Azure Files Transaction Optimized standard tier share deployed on a Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) storage account
  4. D
    An Azure Managed Disks volume using Premium SSD v2 configured with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) and enabled for shared access

Answer

An Azure Files Premium tier share deployed on a Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) storage account
The correct option is the choice recommending an Azure Files Premium tier share deployed on a Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) storage account. Premium Azure Files uses SSDs to deliver sub-millisecond latencies for metadata and small I/O operations, natively supports the SMB protocol, and allows domain join authentication using on-premises AD DS. Deploying it with ZRS replicates data across three separate availability zones in the primary region, ensuring write capabilities survive a datacenter failure.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze protocol and authentication requirements
The solution must support SMB and integrate with on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). Both Azure Files and Azure NetApp Files support these out of the box, whereas Azure Managed Disks require clustering software layers.
This narrows the candidate technologies to file-based storage solutions rather than raw block storage.
2
Evaluate performance requirements
The requirement for sub-millisecond latency for metadata operations necessitates SSD-backed Premium storage. This rules out standard storage tiers.
Standard Azure Files is backed by HDDs, which cannot consistently guarantee the required low latency for transaction-heavy metadata operations.
3
Evaluate high availability and zone resilience requirements
The data must survive a datacenter (zone) outage while remaining fully writeable. This mandates Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS). Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) or Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) do not provide zero-RTO zone failover for write operations in the primary region.
LRS keeps data in a single datacenter, and GRS fails over to a secondary region, usually in a read-only state unless a manual or managed failover is initiated, which does not meet the active-write zone resiliency requirement.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate tier and replication strategy for Azure Files to meet performance, protocol, and high-availability design constraints.
Rate this question

Topics

Blob, File, and Disk Storage Solutions

More questions from this topic