An organization is updating its high-availability and resilience architecture for a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. A system administrator proposes replacing off-site asynchronous data backups with a local RAID 10 storage configuration, arguing that RAID 10 provides both fault tolerance and complete disaster recovery resilience. Which of the following best explains the fundamental vulnerability created by this proposed change?
- RAID 10 provides localized hardware fault tolerance against drive failure but does not protect against catastrophic site loss, data corruption, or physical disasters.Answer
- BRAID 10 functions primarily as a detective control that alerts administrators to disk degradation, but relies on manual failover to maintain high availability.
- CRAID 10 inherently increases the system's Recovery Point Objective (RPO) because parity calculations introduce substantial latency during disk writes.
- DRAID 10 operates strictly as a compensating control designed to reduce bandwidth overhead rather than providing data availability.
Answer
RAID 10 provides localized hardware fault tolerance against drive failure but does not protect against catastrophic site loss, data corruption, or physical disasters.
The correct answer highlights that while RAID 10 offers excellent fault tolerance by mirroring and striping disks locally, it is not a disaster recovery mechanism. If the data center experiences a physical disaster, or if data is deleted or encrypted by ransomware, RAID mirrors those destructive changes immediately across all drives. Off-site backups or replication remain mandatory for disaster recovery.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Distinguishing Fault Tolerance from Disaster Recovery and Backups