Fundamental
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Fundamental
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Zone-Redundant Storage Keeps Data In Region
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 configuring an Azure Storage account to host business-critical application data. To ensure high availability, the architecture team establishes the following data resilience and governance requirements:
- Data must be protected against localized physical datacenter failures within the primary region.
- Data must be synchronously copied across three separate Azure availability zones.
- Data must not be replicated outside the primary region to comply with strict regional data residency regulations.
Which Azure Storage redundancy option should the organization select?
Explanations
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
What Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) Is
Locally redundant storage (LRS) is the lowest-cost redundancy tier in Azure Storage. It synchronously replicates data three times within a single physical datacenter in the primary region.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
While LRS keeps all data inside the primary region and protects against individual disk or server rack failures, it fails to protect against datacenter-level disasters. If a fire, flood, or extensive power failure affects the specific facility housing the storage hardware, all three copies of the data can become temporarily unavailable or permanently lost.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Replicates data three times within a single physical facility.
- Provides at least 11 nines (99.999999999%) of durability over a given year.
- Does not offer protection against facility-wide or zone-level outages.
- Serves as the most budget-friendly option for non-critical workloads.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization sought the lowest-cost storage option for non-critical, easily reproducible test data and did not require resilience against whole datacenter outages.
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
What Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Is
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) expands on standard Geo-redundant storage (GRS) by providing a secondary read-only endpoint. This allows client applications to read data directly from the secondary paired region even when the primary region is healthy and operating normally.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
RA-GRS replicates all data to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away, directly violating the scenario's constraint that data must remain strictly within the primary region for data residency compliance. Furthermore, RA-GRS is engineered for cross-region read availability rather than single-region multi-zone resilience.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Provides an active read-only endpoint in a geographically separated secondary region.
- Protects against regional downtime by allowing read operations to be redirected to the secondary endpoint.
- Replicates data asynchronously across regional boundaries, which conflicts with local regional data governance policies.
- Costs more than standard GRS and single-region options due to dual-region storage and egress traffic.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The organization required cross-region disaster recovery with continuous, direct read access to data in a secondary paired region without data residency restrictions.
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
What Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) Is
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) provides cross-region disaster recovery by first replicating data three times synchronously within a single datacenter in the primary region (using LRS), and then asynchronously replicating the data to a secondary paired region hundreds of miles away, where it is stored three times via LRS.
Why It Doesn't Meet the Requirement
GRS violates the requirement to keep all data exclusively within the primary region. Because GRS automatically replicates data across geographic boundaries to a secondary paired region, it is unsuitable for workloads subject to strict data residency or data sovereignty mandates that prohibit transferring data outside a single region.
Key Characteristics and Limitations
- Maintains a total of six copies of data across two distinct geographical regions.
- Provides at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) of durability.
- In its default configuration, data in the secondary region remains unavailable for read access until Microsoft initiates a regional failover.
- Incurs higher costs and replication latency compared to single-region redundancy configurations.
This Answer Would Be Correct If
The scenario required cross-regional disaster recovery protection against major regional catastrophes and permitted replication to a paired secondary region.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
What Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) Is
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) is an Azure Storage redundancy option that synchronously replicates data across three separate Azure availability zones within the primary region. Each availability zone is an isolated physical datacenter location equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.
How It Meets the Requirements
- Protects against datacenter failures: Because data is distributed across three distinct availability zones, the failure of an entire physical datacenter does not cause data loss or outage for read/write operations.
- Synchronous replication: ZRS writes synchronously across three availability zones in the primary region, ensuring consistent state and zero recovery point loss between zones.
- Regional data residency compliance: All three copies stay entirely within the selected primary Azure region, ensuring adherence to strict governance and compliance policies regarding data sovereignty.
Key Advantages and Capabilities
- Provides high availability and resilience against datacenter-level disasters within a single geographic region.
- Delivers at least 12 nines (99.9999999999%) of data durability over a given year.
- Allows applications to continue reading and writing data seamlessly even if an entire availability zone encounters an outage.
- Eliminates the added latency and expense associated with cross-region geographic replication.
Why This Is Optimal
ZRS strikes the optimal balance between high resilience against datacenter outages and strict regional boundary compliance without introducing secondary region replication.
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