PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company is running a mission-critical SAP S/4HANA system on AWS in the us-east-1 region. The system uses a two-tier architecture with the SAP application server and HANA database on the same EC2 instance. The instance type is an r5.24xlarge with 12 x 2 TB gp3 EBS volumes striped using LVM. The HANA data volume is 10 TB. The company has a disaster recovery (DR) requirement with an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 4 hours. The DR site must be in us-west-2. The company currently takes daily EBS snapshots of the data volume and copies them to us-west-2. However, they are not meeting the RPO. The operations team is considering implementing SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) asynchronously to the DR region. However, network latency between us-east-1 and us-west-2 averages 60 ms. The SAP HANA database has a heavy write workload, with average log writes of 500 MB/sec. The team is concerned that the replication may fall behind and cause data loss. What should the team do to meet the DR requirements while minimizing data loss?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume asynchronous replication alone is sufficient for DR, but they overlook that under high latency and heavy write workloads, the replication lag can exceed the RPO, making a complementary log backup strategy essential to meet the recovery objectives.
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
✓
Implement HSR asynchronously and also enable HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2.
Combining asynchronous HANA System Replication (HSR) with HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2 provides a dual-layer protection strategy. Asynchronous HSR will replicate log changes in near real-time, but given the 60 ms latency and 500 MB/sec write workload, it may fall behind; the log backups act as a safety net to capture any log data that hasn't been replicated yet, allowing recovery with minimal data loss while still meeting the 15-minute RPO.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Implement HSR asynchronously and also enable HANA log backups to an S3 bucket in us-west-2.
Why this is correct
Log backups provide an additional recovery point if replication lags.
- ✗
Switch to synchronous replication to ensure zero data loss.
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous replication over 60 ms latency would severely impact write performance.
- ✗
Increase the HANA log buffer size to reduce the frequency of log flushes, so that less data is sent over the network.
Why it's wrong here
Log buffer size does not affect network replication speed.
- ✗
Use HSR with multiple replicas in us-west-2 to improve replication speed.
Why it's wrong here
Multiple replicas do not improve replication speed; they add overhead.
Visual reference
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 |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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