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A financial services company is migrating its on-premises data center to Azure. They have critical file shares that must maintain 99.99% availability and be resilient to failures of individual data centers within an Azure region. The files are frequently accessed and modified by applications. Which Azure Files redundancy option should be recommended?
- ALocally-redundant storage (LRS)
- BZone-redundant storage (ZRS)
- CGeo-redundant storage (GRS)
- DGeo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Files ensures that data is replicated synchronously across three Azure availability zones within a single region. This provides 99.99% availability and protects against failures of individual data centers, meeting the specified requirements for resilience within a region.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. LRS provides redundancy within a single data center, not protecting against data center failures within a region.
- C. GRS replicates data to a secondary region but does not provide zone redundancy within the primary region for '99.99% availability' against intra-region data center failures.
- D. GZRS provides both zone and geo-redundancy, offering maximum durability, but the requirement is specifically for resilience 'within an Azure region' against 'individual data centers', making ZRS a more direct fit and potentially more cost-effective for this specific ask.
Azure Files Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
A redundancy option for Azure Files that synchronously replicates data across three Azure availability zones in a single region, providing high availability and resilience against zonal failures.
- Provides 99.99% availability
- Protects against data center (Availability Zone) outages
- Synchronous replication within a single Azure region
- Suitable for frequently accessed and modified data requiring high availability
Memory trick: ZRS for Files: A trio of zones keeps your files always reachable.