PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is designing a disaster recovery (DR) strategy for its SAP HANA database on AWS. The primary site is in us-east-1. The DR site must be in us-west-2. The company requires a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours. Which AWS service should be used for replicating HANA data?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse generic data replication services (DMS, S3 CRR, EBS snapshots) with the SAP-native replication mechanism, failing to recognize that only HSR provides the log-level consistency and failover orchestration required for SAP HANA's strict RPO/RTO and ACID guarantees.
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
✓
SAP HANA System Replication to an EC2 instance in us-west-2.
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) is the native, SAP-supported mechanism for replicating HANA databases to a secondary site with low RPO (typically seconds to minutes) and RTO (minutes to hours). It continuously ships log entries from the primary to a standby EC2 instance in us-west-2, meeting the 15-minute RPO and 2-hour RTO requirements. AWS Database Migration Service, EBS Snapshots, and S3 Cross-Region Replication do not provide the log-level, consistent replication needed for SAP HANA's ACID compliance and failover semantics.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Database Migration Service with ongoing replication.
Why it's wrong here
DMS is for migrations, not DR.
- ✗
Amazon EBS Snapshots copied to us-west-2 every hour.
Why it's wrong here
Hourly snapshots cannot achieve 15-minute RPO.
- ✗
Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication for HANA data files.
Why it's wrong here
S3 replication is not suitable for HANA data.
- ✓
SAP HANA System Replication to an EC2 instance in us-west-2.
Why this is correct
HANA System Replication provides near real-time replication.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services 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 PAS-C01 exam.