In this scenario, the life sciences customer is looking to deploy Azure VMware Solution (AVS) while leveraging Azure NetApp Files for high performance and proximity to their applications in the EAST US region. The two critical components to consider in this design are:

Ensuring that the Azure VMware Solution and Azure NetApp Files volumes are in the same Availability Zone (A): This is crucial to reduce latency and ensure optimal performance for high-performance workloads. Placing both AVS and Azure NetApp Files in the same zone ensures that data access is faster and more efficient due to reduced network hops and minimal latency.

Choosing the Azure UltraPerformance Gateway and enabling Azure ExpressRoute FastPath (C): To further optimize performance and provide dedicated, low-latency connectivity between AVS and Azure NetApp Files, using ExpressRoute with FastPath and the UltraPerformance Gateway ensures high bandwidth and lower network latencies. FastPath enables direct traffic flow between the on-premises network and the virtual network hosting AVS, bypassing the need for extra routing hops, thus improving performance.

Using dark sites (B) or public IP addresses (D) is not relevant in this case, as they do not contribute to performance optimization or the integration of Azure NetApp Files and AVS in the same region.

In this scenario, the customer has 100TB of used capacity on an on-premises AFF volume, and 80% of the data is cold and tiered to Amazon S3 usingBlueXP tiering. After tiering, 80TB of cold data is tiered to Amazon S3, leaving 20TB of hot data on the AFF system. WhenBlueXP backup and recoveryperforms the first full backup, it backs up all the data (100TB). Since the backup is a full copy and independent of the tiering process, the total ingress traffic into AWS is80TB (tiered data) + 100TB (full backup), resulting in180TBof total ingress.

When deployingNetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAPfor an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) workload that involveslarge sequential I/O, the sizing characteristic to consider isMBps(megabytes per second). Large sequential I/O workloads, such as video streaming or backup operations, typically rely on high throughput rather than random IOPS.

Capacity (B)andIOPS (C)are important for other workload types, whileCPU (D)is less relevant for storage throughput requirements in this context.

The customer is using 30TB of capacity in NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP but only 10TB of this capacity is actively in use. The most cost-efficient solution in this case is toimplement data tiering and optimization. Data tiering moves inactive or cold data to lower-cost storage (such as object storage in Azure), while keeping frequently accessed data on higher-performance storage. This strategy allows the customer to reduce costs by only paying for premium storage for the data that is actively in use, while moving less frequently accessed data to a cheaper storage tier.

Storing all data in the premium storage tier (A)would increase costs rather than reduce them.BlueXP backup and recovery (B)is for data protection, not cost optimization.Deploying an additional single-node Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance (D)would increase storage costs rather than optimize them.

To enhance the performance when tiering data fromNetApp ONTAP clustersto the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, the following best practices should be considered:

Establish a VNet service endpoint to Azure storage (A): This ensures secure and optimized access to Azure Blob storage directly from the ONTAP cluster, minimizing latency.

Create an Azure ExpressRoute connection (B): ExpressRoute provides a dedicated, high-performance connection between the on-premises ONTAP clusters and Azure Blob storage, reducing latency and increasing throughput.

Whilechoosing the IPspace (C)is important for network configuration, it doesn’t directly enhance performance for cloud-tiering.An HTTPS connection over port 443 (D)is for secure data transfer but isn’t specifically performance-enhancing.

In NetApp BlueXP, theAccount Administratorhas the authority to customize alerts and notification settings. The Account Administrator role is responsible for managing the overall configuration of the BlueXP environment, including setting up and modifying alerts to monitor system health and performance, ensuring that the appropriate notifications are sent when issues arise.

Other roles likeTenant Administrator (A),Connector Administrator (B), andWorkspace Administrator (D)have more limited scopes of control, and they are not responsible for managing global alert and notification settings.

The appropriate NetApp feature to use in this scenario is aCloud Storage Pool. A Cloud Storage Pool in NetApp StorageGRID allows the administrator to tier data to public clouds like Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. This feature lets the administrator keep local replicated copies for performance, geo-dispersederasure-coded copies for durability, and tier cold or backup data to Glacier for long-term retention and cost savings.

FabricPool (B)andFlash Pool (C)are not relevant to S3 data tiering and bucket replication in StorageGRID.Dynamic Disk Pool (D)is more applicable to disk management in traditional storage arrays, not for managing S3 bucket replicas across different storage locations.