PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is running a large SAP S/4HANA production system on AWS. The system consists of a single HANA database instance running on an r5.24xlarge EC2 instance (with 768 GB of RAM), and multiple application server instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The database uses six EBS io1 volumes for data and log files, each with 20,000 provisioned IOPS. The application servers are in an Auto Scaling group. Recently, the company experienced a prolonged database outage when the primary EC2 instance failed. The recovery took over 4 hours because a new instance had to be launched and snapshots restored. The company wants to improve the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to less than 30 minutes for the HANA database. They also want to minimize data loss with an RPO of less than 5 minutes. The company has a second AWS region (us-west-2) available for disaster recovery but prefers to keep costs low for the DR site. Which solution should the company implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to assume a second region is required for DR, but the question explicitly allows using a different Availability Zone within the same region to meet the RTO and RPO goals while keeping costs low, and they may also mistakenly think Amazon RDS supports SAP HANA.
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
✓
Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a standby HANA instance in a different Availability Zone. Use a smaller instance type for the standby to reduce costs. Automate failover using a cluster manager like Pacemaker.
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) with a standby instance in a different Availability Zone provides synchronous replication, achieving an RPO of less than 5 minutes, and automated failover via a cluster manager like Pacemaker can bring the database online in under 30 minutes. Using a smaller instance for the standby reduces DR costs while still allowing the system to run in degraded mode during failover. This meets the RTO and RPO requirements without the high cost of a full-sized DR site in another region.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure SAP HANA System Replication to a standby instance in the same region but use a larger instance to ensure capacity.
Why it's wrong here
This does not utilize the second region for DR.
- ✗
Configure automated Amazon EBS snapshots every 5 minutes and create an AMI for the HANA instance. In the event of a failure, launch a new instance from the AMI in the same Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
Snapshot restore is too slow for 30-minute RTO.
- ✓
Set up SAP HANA System Replication to a standby HANA instance in a different Availability Zone. Use a smaller instance type for the standby to reduce costs. Automate failover using a cluster manager like Pacemaker.
Why this is correct
HSR with failover can achieve RTO < 30 minutes and RPO < 5 minutes.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS for SAP HANA with Multi-AZ deployment to automatically failover to a standby in another Availability Zone.
Why it's wrong here
RDS does not support SAP HANA.
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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.