PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company runs SAP ERP on AWS using a single Availability Zone. The system includes an SAP HANA database on an EC2 instance with 2 TB of memory. The operations team plans to perform a major version upgrade of the SAP HANA database, which requires approximately 4 hours of downtime. The company's SLA allows a maximum of 2 hours of downtime. The team decides to use a blue/green deployment strategy by creating a new HANA instance in a different Availability Zone and replicating data using HANA System Replication (HSR). After setting up replication, they perform a failover to the new instance. However, the failover takes 3 hours due to the large amount of data that needs to be synchronized. What should the team do to meet the 2-hour downtime requirement?
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
✓
Use HANA System Replication with initial snapshot by taking a backup of the source, restoring on the target, and then setting up replication.
Using initial snapshot with HSR reduces the initial sync time significantly because it avoids copying all data over the network. Instead, the snapshot is restored on the target and then replication catches up. Option A is wrong because increasing bandwidth may help but not enough for 2 TB of memory; the initial sync will still take hours. Option B is wrong because multi-AZ for RDS is for RDS databases, not for self-managed HANA on EC2. Option D is wrong because scaling up the source does not help; the issue is data transfer time.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Scale up the source HANA instance to a larger instance type to speed up replication.
Why it's wrong here
Instance size does not affect network transfer speed; replication speed is limited by network and storage I/O.
- ✗
Increase the network bandwidth between the two Availability Zones to 10 Gbps.
Why it's wrong here
Even with high bandwidth, transferring 2 TB of data takes a significant amount of time; initial sync still lengthy.
- ✓
Use HANA System Replication with initial snapshot by taking a backup of the source, restoring on the target, and then setting up replication.
Why this is correct
Initial snapshot reduces sync time by using a backup restore instead of full data transfer over the network.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS for SAP HANA instead of self-managed EC2.
Why it's wrong here
RDS does not support SAP HANA; HANA is self-managed on EC2.
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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.