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Difficulty: HardDesign Storage and Non-Relational Data HA and DR

NovaPharm Logistics is designing a storage architecture for a new pharmaceutical inventory tracking system. The system writes transaction logs to an Azure Block Blob storage account located in East US. To satisfy regulatory compliance and ensure business continuity, the storage architecture must meet the following requirements:
- Designate West US as the secondary region for disaster recovery.
- Provide read access to the transaction logs in the secondary region with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes if the primary region experiences an outage.
- Permit write operations to the secondary region only after a failover is initiated, while minimizing overall storage costs.

Which replication and failover strategy should you recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Configure the storage account to use Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS). Redirect read requests to the secondary endpoint during a primary region outage, and initiate a customer-managed failover to restore write capabilities in the secondary region.Answer
  2. B
    Configure the storage account to use Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS). Configure the logging application in an active-active pattern to write to both the primary and secondary endpoints simultaneously to avoid write interruption.
  3. C
    Configure the storage account to use Locally Redundant Storage (LRS). Configure a custom script in Azure Automation to asynchronously replicate blob snapshots to a secondary LRS storage account in West US every 15 minutes.
  4. D
    Configure the storage account to use Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS). Configure the logging application to write directly to the secondary storage endpoint in West US during a primary region outage without initiating a failover.

Answer

Configure the storage account to use Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS). Redirect read requests to the secondary endpoint during a primary region outage, and initiate a customer-managed failover to restore write capabilities in the secondary region.
The correct option satisfies all the requirements. Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) replicates data asynchronously to a secondary region and exposes a secondary read-only endpoint, allowing the application to meet the 15-minute RTO for reads during an East US outage. To write to the secondary region, a customer-managed failover must be initiated to promote the secondary region to primary.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze regional availability and read requirements.
Since read access is required in the secondary region (West US) during a primary region outage with a low RTO, a geo-redundant storage tier with read access to the secondary endpoint is necessary.
Standard GRS does not expose a readable secondary endpoint unless a failover is triggered. RA-GRS provides a readable secondary endpoint (accountname−secondary.blob.core.windows.netaccountname-secondary.blob.core.windows.net) at all times.
2
Evaluate write capabilities in the secondary region.
Write operations to the secondary endpoint are blocked during normal operations.
Azure Storage does not support active-active multi-region writes. The secondary endpoint remains read-only unless a storage account failover is initiated, which promotes the secondary region to be the new primary.
3
Select the most cost-effective option that satisfies all constraints.
RA-GRS meets all recovery and access requirements at a lower cost than zone-redundant options (like RA-GZRS).
LRS does not provide native cross-region replication, and manual replication scripts introduce high RPO/RTO risks and operational costs.

Key Concept

Azure Storage Redundancy and Failover Capabilities
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

Design Storage and Non-Relational Data HA and DR

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