AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical SAP HANA database on an Azure large instance. They need a disaster recovery solution that provides automatic failover to a secondary region with an RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 30 minutes. The solution must not require manual intervention to start replication. What should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Azure Site Recovery's VM replication with application-consistent replication, but it cannot meet the sub-minute RPO or automatic failover requirements for a critical SAP HANA database without risking data loss or corruption.
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
✓
SAP HANA System Replication with HANA Pacemaker
SAP HANA System Replication with HANA Pacemaker is the correct choice because it provides automatic, synchronous or asynchronous replication of SAP HANA data to a secondary region, meeting the RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 30 minutes. HANA Pacemaker handles automatic failover without manual intervention, ensuring the database is promoted to primary in the disaster recovery region within the required timeframes. This solution is specifically designed for SAP HANA on Azure large instances, offering native integration and support for the required recovery objectives.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
SAP HANA System Replication with HANA Pacemaker
Why this is correct
SAP HANA System Replication replicates the database at the log and data level from a primary to a secondary node, while the HANA Pacemaker cluster provides cluster orchestration, heartbeat monitoring, and STONITH fencing to automatically promote the secondary when the primary fails. This combination yields near-zero RPO with synchronous replication and automatic RTO in minutes, which is exactly what critical SAP HANA workloads need without manual intervention.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery with replication policy for SAP HANA
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery replicates the entire VM at the host/hypervisor level using snapshots and replication of virtual disks, but it has no awareness of SAP HANA transaction semantics or log sequence numbers. Although you can assign a replication policy, ASR cannot place the database into a consistent state, execute HANA log replay, or perform automatic failover of the SAP HANA database itself—it would leave you with a copy that still requires manual database recovery steps.
- ✗
Azure NetApp Files with cross-region replication
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files cross-region replication is a storage-based asynchronous copy of volume snapshots, not an SAP-certified database high-availability mechanism. It replicates raw files without replaying HANA redo logs, so the target volume lacks a running database instance and cannot participate in automatic failover or be promoted by HANA's cluster stack; it only provides a storage-level disaster recovery copy.
- ✗
Azure Backup for SAP HANA
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup for SAP HANA leverages HANA's Backint interface to stream full, differential, and transaction-log backups to an isolated vault, giving you a recoverable point-in-time snapshot but not a continuously replicated secondary. Recovery requires manually initiating a restore and then performing the necessary post-restore steps, so RPO is governed by backup frequency and RTO is measured in tens of minutes or hours—not acceptable for automatic failover of a critical database.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Data Factory for Data Integration Design
Key term
BIA and RPO RTO Design
Business Impact Analysis and the design of Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective define how much data loss and downtime a business can tolerate after an IT failure, guiding the architecture of backup and disaster recovery systems.
Key term
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a Microsoft Azure service that keeps your business applications and data running by automatically replicating them to a secondary location and failing over if the primary site goes down.
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