PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company has an SAP HANA database running on an EC2 instance with a single 500 GB gp2 volume. The database is experiencing I/O bottlenecks. The operations team wants to increase IOPS without changing the volume size. Which action should they take?
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
✓
Attach an additional gp2 volume and use it for temporary data.
Attaching an additional gp2 volume and moving temporary data to it offloads I/O from the primary HANA data volume, effectively increasing the total IOPS available to the database without changing the size of the original volume. This reduces the I/O bottleneck and improves performance. Option A (EBS optimization) improves network bandwidth but does not increase the volume's IOPS. Option B (st1) is throughput-optimized and unsuitable for low-latency database workloads like SAP HANA. Option C (increasing volume size) directly violates the requirement of not changing the volume size.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable EBS optimization on the EC2 instance.
Why it's wrong here
EBS optimization improves network throughput to the instance but does not increase the IOPS of the EBS volume itself.
- ✗
Change the volume type to st1 (throughput optimized).
Why it's wrong here
st1 volumes are throughput-optimized and not designed for the low-latency, random I/O requirements of SAP HANA.
- ✗
Modify the volume to increase its size to 1,000 GB.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the volume size would change the volume size, which does not meet the stated requirement of not changing the volume size.
- ✓
Attach an additional gp2 volume and use it for temporary data.
Why this is correct
Attaching an additional gp2 volume for temporary data offloads I/O from the primary volume, increasing effective IOPS without altering the original volume size. This is a common technique to alleviate I/O bottlenecks.
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