PAS-C01 Design of SAP Workloads on AWS Practice Question
A company runs its SAP ERP system on AWS with an Oracle database on an EC2 instance. The system is used by thousands of users globally. Recently, the database has been experiencing slow query performance, especially during end-of-month processing. The administrator notices that the database instance is an r5.8xlarge with 32 vCPUs and 256 GB of memory, running on a single EBS io1 volume with 20,000 IOPS for the data files. The administrator has already optimized the SQL queries and increased the SGA size. However, performance remains poor. The Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the EBS volume's Average Queue Length is consistently above 10 and the read latency spikes to over 100 ms during peak times. The CPU utilization is around 70%. Which action should the administrator take to resolve the I/O bottleneck?
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
✓
Create multiple EBS io1 volumes and stripe them using RAID 0 at the OS level.
Striping multiple EBS io1 volumes using RAID 0 at the OS level increases I/O parallelism, distributing the workload across multiple volumes and reducing the average queue length and latency. Option A is incorrect because gp3 volumes may not provide sufficient IOPS for this demanding workload, and a single volume still creates a bottleneck. Option C is incorrect because increasing IOPS on a single volume may not resolve the queue length issue if the volume is already at its throughput limit. Option D is incorrect because upgrading the instance does not directly improve EBS performance; the bottleneck is at the storage layer.
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 volume type to gp3 and increase the baseline IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
Changing to gp3 may not provide sufficient IOPS for this high-I/O workload; io1 is still suitable with multiple volumes.
- ✓
Create multiple EBS io1 volumes and stripe them using RAID 0 at the OS level.
Why this is correct
Correct. RAID 0 striping increases parallelism, distributing I/O across volumes to reduce queue depth and latency.
- ✗
Increase the IOPS of the existing io1 volume to 40,000.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing IOPS on a single volume may not help if the volume is already at its throughput limit. The queue length indicates the volume's queuing behavior, not just IOPS.
- ✗
Upgrade the EC2 instance to an r5.12xlarge with more network bandwidth.
Why it's wrong here
Upgrading instance type does not directly address the storage I/O bottleneck; the issue is at the EBS level.
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 |
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.