AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
You are designing a high-availability solution for a stateful application that uses Azure NetApp Files (ANF) for persistent storage. The application must withstand a zonal failure within a region. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Files ZRS (which is zone-redundant but not ANF) with Azure NetApp Files, or assume that backup snapshots alone provide high availability for zonal failures, when in fact continuous replication is required for minimal downtime and data loss.
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
✓
Use Azure NetApp Files cross-zone replication to replicate data between availability zones.
Azure NetApp Files cross-zone replication asynchronously replicates volume data from a source zone to a destination zone within the same region, enabling failover if the primary zone fails. This meets the requirement for zonal failure tolerance while preserving the stateful application's persistent storage. Other options either lack native zone-redundant support for ANF or provide only backup, not continuous replication.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Files with zone-redundant storage (ZRS) and SMB multi-channel.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files is a distinct managed file offering, not a substitute for Azure NetApp Files (ANF). While ZRS on Azure Files replicates data synchronously across availability zones, SMB multi-channel is only a performance feature that improves throughput by using multiple SMB connections, it does nothing for availability. This option fails the stated requirement to use ANF and ignores that ANF itself does not support zone-redundant storage; it would require re-architecting to a different file protocol and feature set.
- ✓
Use Azure NetApp Files cross-zone replication to replicate data between availability zones.
Why this is correct
Azure NetApp Files cross-zone replication continuously asynchronously replicates volume data from a primary ANF volume in one availability zone to a secondary volume in another zone, using NetApp SnapMirror technology. If the primary zone fails, you can mount the destination volume in the secondary zone, providing a much lower RTO than backup and true zonal resilience. This directly meets the high-availability requirement while staying within the ANF service, and the RPO is typically in the range of a few minutes.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup for ANF with daily snapshots stored in a different zone.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for ANF takes point-in-time snapshots and stores recovery points, but a backup is not an active replica: it has to be restored to a new volume before application traffic can resume, which yields a high RTO. Daily snapshots also create a maximum data loss window of up to 24 hours, which is generally unacceptable for high availability. Storing the backup in a different zone only protects the backup artifacts themselves; it never provides automatic failover, continuous replication, or instant read access from a secondary zone.
- ✗
Deploy the application in an Availability Set and use ANF volumes with zone-redundant storage (ZRS).
Why it's wrong here
An Availability Set spreads VMs across fault domains and update domains within a single availability zone, so it protects only against rack-level or maintenance events, not a full availability zone outage. Additionally, Azure NetApp Files does not support zone-redundant storage (ZRS); ANF volumes are provisioned in a single availability zone and use locally redundant storage (LRS) by default. Pairing an Availability Set with an unbacked ANF volume still leaves the file data vulnerable, so this combination does not deliver zonal high availability.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This AZ-305 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the AZ-305 exam.