SAP HANA Disaster Recovery Strategies

Quick Answer

This question is testing whether you understand that SAP HANA disaster recovery across AWS Regions can be achieved through two fundamentally different layers of replication, and that both are legitimate. SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) in asynchronous mode is the native, database-level mechanism: the primary system ships log and data changes to a secondary HANA instance without waiting for acknowledgment, which keeps performance impact on the primary low even over the longer network distance between us-east-1 and us-west-2. The second valid strategy here is AWS Database Migration Service, which works at a different layer entirely - it continuously captures changes from the source HANA database and applies them to a target HANA instance in the DR region, achieving near-real-time replication without relying on HANA's own replication features. Recognizing both as correct means understanding that DR replication doesn't have to come from a single tool; a native database feature and an AWS data-movement service can both satisfy the same requirement, just through different mechanisms. The key discriminator for HSR is the ASYNC mode specifically, since synchronous replication over a cross-country distance would introduce unacceptable latency to the primary. When a question asks for cross-region HANA DR strategies and offers a mix of native HANA features and AWS services, expect more than one to be valid, provided each independently delivers a consistent replicated copy of the data.