PK0-005 Practice Question: Basics of IT Infrastructure and IT Project Management
A project manager is leading a project to upgrade the storage area network (SAN) for a hospital's electronic health records (EHR) system. The current SAN is reaching capacity and has performance issues during peak hours. The new SAN must support high availability with synchronous replication between two data centers located 10 km apart. The project budget is tight, and the timeline is aggressive. During a risk assessment, the project manager identifies that the fiber optic cable between the data centers is owned by a third-party provider and has a history of outages. The project sponsor is concerned about meeting the go-live date and asks the project manager to recommend a course of action to mitigate the risk of cable outages affecting the SAN replication. Which of the following is the BEST course of action?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse high-availability components (like redundant controllers) with network path redundancy, or incorrectly assume that adjusting replication timing or mode can substitute for fixing the underlying physical connectivity risk.
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
✓
Work with the fiber provider to install a second, diverse fiber path between the data centers
The risk is specifically a single point of failure in the fiber path between data centers. Installing a second, diverse fiber path eliminates this single point of failure, ensuring synchronous replication can continue even if one cable is cut. This directly addresses the sponsor's concern about go-live delays due to cable outages, without changing the replication mode or adding unnecessary hardware.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Purchase redundant SAN controllers to provide failover in case of a controller failure
Why it's wrong here
Redundant controllers protect against storage processor failure, not against the third-party fibre link between data centres, so the identified outage risk remains unmitigated. It is tempting because redundancy is a standard availability control; it would be correct for controller or node failure within a single site.
- ✗
Increase the synchronous replication interval to reduce the impact of potential outages
Why it's wrong here
Synchronous replication has no interval to adjust; each write must be acknowledged by both sites before completing, so the option describes a mechanism that does not exist. It is tempting because tuning replication timing sounds like a low-cost mitigation; it would apply to asynchronous schedules, not synchronous writes.
- ✓
Work with the fiber provider to install a second, diverse fiber path between the data centers
Why this is correct
A second diverse fibre path provides physical route diversity, so a single third-party cable outage cannot break synchronous replication between the data centres. This directly mitigates the identified third-party outage risk while preserving the high-availability and 10 km replication constraints.
- ✗
Replace synchronous replication with asynchronous replication over the existing WAN connection
Why it's wrong here
Asynchronous replication abandons the synchronous requirement, so the recovery point objective widens and recent EHR writes could be lost. It is tempting because it tolerates latency and link outages; it would be correct for long-distance replication where some data loss is acceptable.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PK0-005 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA 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 PK0-005 exam.