PAS-C01 EFS Availability Zone Practice Question
A company runs SAP HANA on AWS using a clustered environment with two EC2 instances in an active/passive configuration. The cluster uses a shared EFS file system for the SAP HANA shared volume. The operations team recently migrated the EFS file system from the previous generation to Elastic Throughput mode to improve performance. After the migration, the HANA database becomes unresponsive intermittently. The team notices that the EFS mount target is in a different Availability Zone than the active HANA instance. What is the most likely cause of the unresponsiveness?
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
✓
The EFS mount target is in a different Availability Zone than the active HANA instance, causing high latency and potential timeouts.
The most likely cause of unresponsiveness is that the EFS mount target is in a different Availability Zone than the active HANA instance. Cross-AZ access to EFS introduces higher latency and potential network timeouts, which can cause HANA database interruptions. Option A is incorrect: EFS provides adequate throughput for HANA shared volumes; IOPS is not the issue. Option B is incorrect: Elastic Throughput mode automatically scales throughput based on workload activity, so it would not throttle unless the workload exceeds burst credit balance, but that is not indicated. Option D is incorrect: EFS does not have a hard limit on concurrent connections from two EC2 instances.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The EFS file system does not provide sufficient IOPS for HANA workloads.
Why it's wrong here
EFS can scale IOPS; the issue is not IOPS but latency due to cross-AZ access.
- ✗
The EFS Elastic Throughput mode is throttling the HANA database traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Throughput mode is designed to handle bursts and should not throttle unless extremely high usage exceeds limits.
- ✓
The EFS mount target is in a different Availability Zone than the active HANA instance, causing high latency and potential timeouts.
Why this is correct
Accessing EFS across Availability Zones increases latency, which can cause HANA to become unresponsive.
- ✗
The EFS file system has reached its maximum number of concurrent connections.
Why it's wrong here
EFS supports thousands of concurrent connections; this is unlikely to be the cause.
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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.