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?
Initial snapshot reduces sync time by using a backup restore instead of full data transfer over the network.
Why this answer
Option C is correct. 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.