PAS-C01 Technology Practice Question
An SAP administrator notices that the SAP HANA database performance has degraded significantly during peak hours. The HANA instance is running on an r5.8xlarge EC2 instance with EBS gp2 volumes. Monitoring shows high I/O wait times on the data volume. Which change is MOST likely to improve performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume upgrading the instance size (Option B) will fix I/O bottlenecks, overlooking that EBS volume performance is a separate constraint, or they choose gp3 (Option C) thinking it is always an improvement, without considering that the specified 3000 IOPS is too low for the workload.
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 Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes with high IOPS.
The performance degradation is due to high I/O wait times on the data volume, indicating that the EBS volume's IOPS limit is being saturated. Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes provide up to 256,000 IOPS per volume with consistent sub-millisecond latency, which directly addresses the I/O bottleneck for SAP HANA workloads. In contrast, gp3 volumes are capped at 16,000 IOPS, which is insufficient for peak-hour demands on an r5.8xlarge instance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment for SAP HANA.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is for high availability, not performance.
- ✗
Upgrade the EC2 instance to a larger size like r5.16xlarge.
Why it's wrong here
Instance size increase adds vCPU and memory but not I/O performance if the bottleneck is EBS.
- ✗
Change the EBS volume type from gp2 to gp3 with 3000 IOPS.
Why it's wrong here
gp3 provides baseline performance, but for HANA, io2 with provisioned IOPS is preferred for consistent performance.
- ✓
Use Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes with high IOPS.
Why this is correct
io2 volumes provide consistent low-latency performance suitable for HANA workloads.
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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.