PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS. The system uses an SAP HANA database with a single EC2 instance. The operations team needs to implement a disaster recovery (DR) strategy with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. The DR site is in a different AWS Region. The team currently takes daily EBS snapshots and sends them to the DR region using AWS Backup cross-region copy. However, the RPO is not met because snapshots are only taken daily. Which combination of actions should the team take to meet the RPO and RTO?
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
✓
Set up HANA System Replication (HSR) between the primary and DR regions. In the DR region, maintain a standby HANA instance in sync. Use automated failover scripts.
HANA System Replication (HSR) provides near-continuous data replication, meeting the 15-minute RPO. In the DR region, maintaining a standby HANA instance in sync and using automated failover scripts can achieve the 1-hour RTO. Option A is wrong because increasing EBS snapshot frequency to every hour still does not meet the 15-minute RPO (snapshots are not continuous) and RTO may be longer due to restore time. Option B is wrong because CloudEndure Disaster Recovery is designed for server-level replication but is not optimized for HANA; it may not ensure database consistency and could impact performance. Option D is wrong because Amazon EBS multi-region replication does not guarantee database consistency for a running SAP HANA database.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the frequency of EBS snapshots to every hour and use cross-region copy. Also, pre-warm the DR instance by restoring the latest snapshot.
Why it's wrong here
Hourly snapshots still exceed 15-minute RPO, and restore time may exceed 1 hour RTO.
- ✗
Use AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to replicate the entire EC2 instance to the DR region.
Why it's wrong here
CloudEndure is a general DR solution but may introduce additional latency and complexity for HANA; also, it may not guarantee database-consistent recovery without application-level integration.
- ✓
Set up HANA System Replication (HSR) between the primary and DR regions. In the DR region, maintain a standby HANA instance in sync. Use automated failover scripts.
Why this is correct
HSR provides low RPO (seconds to minutes) and with a pre-provisioned standby, RTO can be under 1 hour.
- ✗
Use Amazon EBS multi-region replication for the HANA data volumes.
Why it's wrong here
EBS replication replicates block-level changes but does not ensure database consistency; crash-consistent recovery may not be valid.
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