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Difficulty: HardData Redundancy and High Availability

A financial services company is designing a storage solution to host shared configuration files for a containerized trading application. The application requires SMB file shares with sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS. The storage solution must remain available if a single availability zone in the primary region fails. Additionally, the company requires disaster recovery capabilities to recover the files in a secondary Azure region with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours. You plan to use Azure File Sync to replicate files to the secondary region. Which redundancy configuration should you select for the primary Azure storage account to meet these requirements?

  1. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)Answer
  2. B
    Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)
  3. C
    Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
  4. D
    Geo-redundant storage (GRS)

Answer

Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) in a Premium file share (FileStorage) account combined with Azure File Sync for regional replication.
The correct option stating Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) is correct because the performance requirements (sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS for SMB) dictate the use of Premium Azure Files. Premium file shares are hosted in FileStorage accounts, which only support LRS and ZRS redundancy options. To satisfy the high availability requirement of surviving a zone outage, ZRS is required because it replicates data synchronously across three availability zones. The regional recovery requirement is fulfilled by replicating data to the secondary region using Azure File Sync, which easily accommodates the relaxed 24-hour RPO constraint.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Determine the required performance tier based on latency and protocol requirements.
The application requires SMB file shares with sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS, which mandates the use of Premium Azure Files (FileStorage account type) instead of the Standard tier.
Standard storage accounts do not guarantee sub-millisecond latency for file shares.
2
Identify the available redundancy options for the selected performance tier.
Premium file shares only support Locally-redundant storage (LRS) and Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options.
Native geo-redundant options (GRS, GZRS, RA-GRS, RA-GZRS) are not supported for the FileStorage account type.
3
Evaluate the resiliency requirement against the available options.
To survive the failure of a single availability zone in the primary region, Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) must be selected.
LRS does not protect against zone-level failures, whereas ZRS synchronously replicates data across three zones.
4
Ensure the disaster recovery requirement is satisfied by the architecture.
The 24-hour RPO for regional disaster recovery is met by configuring Azure File Sync to replicate files from the primary ZRS Premium file share to the secondary region.
Since native geo-replication is unsupported for Premium file shares, an external replication mechanism like Azure File Sync is necessary to meet the DR requirements.

Key Concept

Azure Storage account type features and limitations regarding redundancy tiers, specifically that Premium File Shares (FileStorage) support only LRS and ZRS, requiring application-level or auxiliary replication tools (such as Azure File Sync) to achieve regional disaster recovery.
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Topics

Data Redundancy and High Availability

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