AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Question
A multinational company stores large amounts of unstructured data (documents, images) that must be read with low latency from multiple global regions. Data is written primarily in one region but read globally. Cost optimization is a key requirement. Which Azure storage replication option should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse GRS with RA-GRS, assuming geo-redundancy alone provides read access to the secondary region, but GRS requires a manual failover to enable reads, while RA-GRS allows reads from the secondary region at all times.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure Blob Storage with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
B is correct because RA-GRS provides geo-redundant storage with read access to the secondary region, enabling low-latency reads from multiple global regions while maintaining cost efficiency. The data is written primarily in one region, but RA-GRS allows read requests to be served from the secondary region without additional compute costs, meeting the global read requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Blob Storage with geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Why it's wrong here
GRS replicates data synchronously to a paired secondary region, but it does not expose a read-only endpoint for that secondary copy during normal operations. To read from the secondary location, a failover must be performed, which makes GRS unsuitable for continuously serving low-latency global read traffic. Thus, while GRS improves durability and disaster readiness, it does not help reduce read latency for users near the secondary region in steady state.
- ✓
Azure Blob Storage with read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Why this is correct
RA-GRS extends GRS by providing a read-only endpoint at the secondary region, so clients can retrieve data directly from the geo-replicated copy without waiting for a failover. This lets the storage account serve low-latency reads in both the primary and the paired secondary regions while still using standard, cost-effective blob storage rather than premium tiers. Note that the secondary is eventually consistent, and there can be a slight replication delay, but for most unstructured content such as documents and media this is an acceptable trade-off.
- ✗
Azure Files with premium shares
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files premium shares use SSD-backed storage and are tailored for enterprise applications requiring sub-millisecond latency, but they come at a per-GiB cost that makes them prohibitively expensive for massive unstructured datasets. More fundamentally, premium Azure Files shares do not support geo-redundant storage (they are restricted to LRS and ZRS), so they cannot offer geo-replicated read endpoints for global clients. Standard Azure Files shares can be geo-replicated to a secondary region, but they still lack the built-in low-latency, read-only secondary access pattern that RA-GRS provides.
- ✗
Azure NetApp Files
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files is an enterprise-grade, high-availability file service designed for performance-sensitive NFS and SMB workloads in the cloud, not for cost-effectively storing huge volumes of unstructured data. It consumes dedicated compute and networking resources, making it significantly more expensive per GiB than blob storage and better suited to active workloads like VDI or HPC. Cross-region replication with NetApp Files depends on ONTAP-based data replication features that require manual configuration and additional cost; there is no native geo-redundant read-only endpoint to serve low-latency global read requests automatically.
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