AZ-305 Question 216
Single answerA manufacturing company needs to migrate 30 TB of unstructured design files from their on-premises data center to Azure. Their Internet connection is slow, so performing an online transfer directly to Azure Blob Storage would take too long and risk timeouts. Additionally, the engineering team updates several files daily as part of production workflows. You must recommend a migration solution that allows quick offline bulk transfer for the initial data, and then continue with incremental updates to keep the cloud environment synchronized. Which migration approach should you recommend?
- A
Use Azure Data Box for the initial transfer and then use AzCopy for incremental updates.
- B
Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the file shares and fail over to Azure.
- C
Use Azure Data Migration Service to replicate the files to Azure Blob Storage.
- D
Set up high-speed ExpressRoute for a direct online migration of all files at once.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
For large sets of unstructured data, an offline transfer using Azure Data Box is often recommended, especially when on-premises bandwidth is insufficient. Data Box devices allow you to ship data securely and quickly to an Azure data center. Once the bulk data is in Azure, AzCopy can manage incremental updates over the WAN. This approach follows Microsoft's best practice of combining offline seeding with incremental online sync for minimal disruption. Refer to Azure Data Box documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/databox/) for detailed guidance.
- A. Correct.
Correct: Azure Data Box is designed for large offline data transfers to Azure. After the bulk data is ingested, AzCopy can be used to handle incremental updates over a slower network connection. This approach minimizes downtime and leverages a combination of offline and online strategies.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect: Azure Site Recovery is primarily intended for disaster recovery of virtual machines and workloads, not for migrating large volumes of unstructured data. Although it can replicate disks, it's not the most efficient tool for large, file-based data migration focused on unstructured content.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect: Azure Data Migration Service is best suited for structured data migrations (e.g., databases). It is not recommended for large-scale unstructured file migrations where offline seeding and incremental sync are key requirements.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect: Setting up ExpressRoute could theoretically provide a faster connection, but it would require lead times, additional costs, and might still take longer than an offline shipping method for 30 TB of data. This option doesn't address the immediate need for quick, offline transfer plus incremental updates.