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Difficulty: Very hardData Redundancy and High Availability

A scientific research institute is designing the storage infrastructure for a high-performance computing (HPC) application. The application requires Azure Blob Storage with sub-millisecond latency and high throughput for write operations, which necessitates the Premium block blobs performance tier.

The architecture must satisfy the following resilience and accessibility requirements:
1. Protect against the outage of a single datacenter in the primary region by replicating data synchronously.
2. Protect against a regional disaster by maintaining an asynchronous copy of the data in a secondary paired region.
3. Allow a reporting tool located in the secondary region to read the data at any time without initiating a storage account failover.

Which storage solution should you recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy a Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in the primary region, and implement a custom replication workflow using Azure Data Factory to copy blobs to a Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in the secondary region.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy a single Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Read-Access Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (RA-GZRS) to provide synchronous replication in the primary region and read-only access in the secondary region.
  3. C
    Deploy a Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) in the primary region, and configure Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to replicate the storage account contents asynchronously to the secondary region.
  4. D
    Deploy a Standard General Purpose v2 storage account configured with Read-Access Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (RA-GZRS) to support both zone redundancy and read-only secondary access.

Answer

Deploy a Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in the primary region, and implement a custom replication workflow using Azure Data Factory to copy blobs to a Premium Block Blob storage account configured with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in the secondary region.
The correct solution uses a Premium Block Blob storage account with Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in the primary region, which meets the low-latency requirement and protects against a single datacenter outage. Because Premium Block Blob storage accounts do not natively support geo-redundancy (GRS, GZRS, RA-GRS, or RA-GZRS), a secondary storage account must be deployed in the secondary region. Azure Data Factory can then be used to asynchronously replicate the blobs, providing read access to the secondary region without initiating a failover.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the workload performance requirements.
Determine that the sub-millisecond latency and high throughput requirements necessitate the Premium block blobs performance tier, which rules out Standard GPv2 storage accounts.
Standard storage accounts do not provide the performance characteristics needed for low-latency HPC write workloads.
2
Evaluate local high availability requirements.
Identify that to protect against a single datacenter outage in the primary region, Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) is required, eliminating Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) configurations.
ZRS replicates data synchronously across three availability zones, whereas LRS replicates data only within a single datacenter.
3
Assess geo-redundancy options for Premium Block Blobs.
Recognize that Premium Block Blob storage accounts only support LRS and ZRS. Native geo-redundancy (GRS, GZRS, RA-GZRS) is unavailable.
Azure architectural constraints limit native geo-redundancy options to Standard storage accounts.
4
Design the secondary region disaster recovery and read access mechanism.
Deploy a separate Premium Block Blob storage account in the secondary region and implement an asynchronous copy mechanism (such as Azure Data Factory) to replicate data.
This allows the reporting tool in the secondary region to read the data from the secondary storage account without initiating a failover, while maintaining the performance and primary availability requirements.

Key Concept

Premium Block Blob storage accounts only support Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS). To achieve geo-redundancy and read access in a secondary region for Premium Block Blobs, you must deploy a separate storage account in the secondary region and implement a custom replication workflow.
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Topics

Data Redundancy and High Availability

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