PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is migrating its SAP ERP system to AWS. The system has strict high availability requirements with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours. The SAP application and database (SAP HANA) must be in the same AWS Region but can be in different Availability Zones. Which architecture should the company use to meet these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse asynchronous replication (which risks data loss) with synchronous replication (which ensures zero RPO), or they underestimate the recovery time of snapshot-based or backup-based approaches, assuming they can meet strict RTO/RPO targets.
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
✓
Deploy SAP HANA in a Multi-AZ cluster using synchronous replication across two Availability Zones, with the SAP application servers in an Auto Scaling group across the same AZs.
It uses synchronous replication for SAP HANA across two Availability Zones, which ensures zero data loss and meets the RPO of 15 minutes. The Multi-AZ cluster with automatic failover achieves the RTO of 2 hours, while the SAP application servers in an Auto Scaling group across the same AZs provide high availability and load balancing. This architecture aligns with AWS best practices for SAP HANA HA, leveraging HANA System Replication (HSR) in sync mode.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy SAP HANA in a single Availability Zone with asynchronous replication to a secondary instance in another AZ, and use manual failover.
Why it's wrong here
Manual failover would exceed the 2-hour RTO.
- ✓
Deploy SAP HANA in a Multi-AZ cluster using synchronous replication across two Availability Zones, with the SAP application servers in an Auto Scaling group across the same AZs.
Why this is correct
Multi-AZ synchronous replication provides automatic failover and meets RPO and RTO.
- ✗
Deploy SAP HANA on a single EC2 instance with EBS snapshots every 5 minutes, and use a secondary instance in another AZ with snapshots restored.
Why it's wrong here
EBS snapshots are not suitable for HANA database replication and recovery would be slow.
- ✗
Deploy SAP HANA on a single EC2 instance with hourly backups to Amazon S3 and a script to restore the backup on a new instance in a different AZ.
Why it's wrong here
Hourly backups exceed the 15-minute RPO and restore time would exceed RTO.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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