Fundamental
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Fundamental
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Geo-Redundant Storage for Regional Disaster Recovery
Free sample question, answered and explained below. The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam practice bank has 688 more like it. Try 10 free: instant score, no account.
An organization is deploying critical database backups to Azure storage. The organization needs to ensure the highest resilience against regional disasters while managing operational costs.
The deployment must meet the following requirements:
- Data must be replicated to a secondary physical region located hundreds of miles away from the primary region.
- Data in the primary region must be protected against local hardware failures.
- The secondary replica is only required during a regional failover, so continuous read access to the secondary region is not needed.
Which storage redundancy option should the organization configure?
Explanations
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
What Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) Is
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates data synchronously across three distinct Azure availability zones within the primary region. Each availability zone is an independent physical location with separate power, cooling, and networking.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- Confined to a single region: ZRS only protects against data center failures within the same geographic region. It does not replicate data to a secondary region.
- Inadequate for regional disasters: If a severe regional catastrophe affects all availability zones in that region, ZRS cannot provide geo-redundant recovery.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Offers 12 nines (99.9999999999%) of data durability across zones in one region.
- Provides high availability for applications requiring synchronous intra-region failover.
- Does not span across secondary paired Azure regions.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The workload required resilience against individual data center outages within a single region without needing cross-region replication.
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
What Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) Is
Locally redundant storage (LRS) is the baseline redundancy option in Azure Storage. It synchronously replicates data three times within a single physical data center in the primary region.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- No regional protection: LRS does not replicate data across availability zones or to a secondary region. If a fire, flood, or widespread power failure affects the single data center hosting the storage, data can be temporarily or permanently lost.
- Fails disaster recovery criteria: The scenario specifically requires replication to a secondary region located hundreds of miles away.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Provides 11 nines (99.999999999%) of data durability within a single data center.
- Lowest cost redundancy option among all Azure storage replication types.
- Vulnerable to facility-level and regional disasters.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization wanted the lowest possible cost for non-critical, easily reproducible data that does not require protection against data center or regional outages.
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
What Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Does
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) replicates data across primary and secondary regions just like GRS, but it additionally provides a dedicated, read-only endpoint for the secondary replica at all times.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
- Unnecessary cost: The scenario explicitly states that continuous read access to the secondary region is not required, making RA-GRS more expensive than necessary for this use case.
- Over-engineered for passive backups: When data is only read after a formal regional failover, standard GRS is the recommended and cost-effective choice.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Provides continuous read availability for applications needing high read throughput across multiple geographies.
- Has higher licensing and storage costs compared to standard GRS.
- Uses asynchronous replication to the secondary region, meaning secondary reads may experience slight replication lag.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization needed active, read-only access to secondary data replicas for reporting or high-availability read architectures while the primary region is still operational.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
What Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) Is
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is an Azure data redundancy option designed to deliver regional disaster recovery. It synchronizes data within the primary region and then asynchronously replicates it to a paired secondary region located hundreds of miles away.
How It Meets the Requirements
- Cross-region disaster recovery: GRS copies data asynchronously to a secondary region, protecting workloads against major regional outages, natural disasters, or catastrophic events.
- Primary region protection: In the primary region, GRS maintains three synchronous copies using Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) principles, protecting against local disk and node failures.
- Cost efficiency: Because GRS does not enable active read endpoints on the secondary region, it costs less than Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) while fully meeting backup and disaster recovery needs.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- Provides six total replicas (three in the primary region and three in the secondary paired region).
- Delivers at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) of data durability over a given year.
- Supports automated or customer-managed failover to the secondary region if the primary region becomes permanently unavailable.
Why This Is Optimal
GRS satisfies all requirements by providing cross-region replication for disaster resilience without incurring the extra costs associated with continuous read access to the secondary region.
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