PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
A company is running an SAP HANA database on an Amazon EC2 instance. The instance type is r5.4xlarge with 16 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. The storage is configured with a single 400 GB gp2 EBS volume for /hana/data and a separate 100 GB gp2 volume for /hana/log. The database experiences high latency during peak loads. Which change will most likely improve performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume increasing instance size (Option B) will resolve all performance issues, overlooking that SAP HANA's high-latency problem under peak load is typically storage-bound, not compute-bound, and that gp2's burst model is the root cause.
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
✓
Change the EBS volumes to io2 Block Express volumes with provisioned IOPS.
SAP HANA on EC2 requires consistently low latency for /hana/data and /hana/log volumes, especially under peak loads. The gp2 volume's burst model can deplete credits, causing throughput throttling and high latency. io2 Block Express volumes provide consistent, provisioned IOPS performance without reliance on burst credits, directly addressing the latency issue.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Change the EBS volumes to io2 Block Express volumes with provisioned IOPS.
Why this is correct
io2 Block Express provides consistent low latency and high IOPS, critical for SAP HANA.
- ✗
Increase the instance size to r5.8xlarge.
Why it's wrong here
More CPU/memory may help but the bottleneck is likely I/O.
- ✗
Disable the EBS volume caching.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling caching would degrade performance.
- ✗
Create a RAID 0 stripe of multiple gp2 volumes.
Why it's wrong here
RAID 0 improves throughput but gp2 still has variable latency.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PAS-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,616-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.