AZ-305 Design data storage solutions Practice Question
A financial services company is migrating its on-premises SAP HANA database to Azure. The database requires high IOPS and low latency with a capacity of 4 TB. They need to choose a storage solution that supports SAP HANA certified configurations. Which Azure storage solution should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates assume Premium SSD v2 is the best choice for all high-performance workloads, but SAP HANA has specific certification requirements that exclude Premium SSD v2 for production databases, making Ultra Disk the only correct option among the managed disks listed.
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
✓
Azure Ultra Disk Storage
Azure Ultra Disk Storage is the correct choice because it is the only Azure managed disk that is SAP HANA certified for high IOPS and sub-millisecond latency, which is critical for SAP HANA workloads. It supports up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,000 MB/s throughput per disk, and can be provisioned with up to 64 TB capacity, easily covering the 4 TB requirement. Premium SSD v2 is not SAP HANA certified for production databases, and Azure NetApp Files, while offering high performance, is not a managed disk and requires specific NFS configurations that may not meet SAP HANA's strict certification requirements for block storage.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Premium SSD v2
Why it's wrong here
Azure Premium SSD v2 delivers high IOPS with per-disk provisioning and sub-millisecond latency for many production workloads, but SAP has not included it in the official SAP HANA on Azure certification matrix. For production SAP HANA, Microsoft and SAP currently require Azure Ultra Disk or Azure Premium SSD (v1) block storage; using an uncertified option like Premium SSD v2 voids the supportable configuration for large HANA databases. Thus, despite strong performance, it cannot be selected for this financial migration.
- ✓
Azure Ultra Disk Storage
Why this is correct
Azure Ultra Disk Storage is the correct choice because it is certified for SAP HANA and delivers the extreme performance the service expects: IOPS, throughput, and latency can be independently provisioned and dynamically adjusted without downtime. This lets a financial services company configure a volume that matches SAP's performance benchmarks for transaction workloads, with sub-millisecond read latency and up to thousands of IOPS. Ultra Disk is the only Azure managed disk besides Premium SSD v1 that meets SAP HANA's production support requirements.
- ✗
Azure Standard HDD
Why it's wrong here
Azure Standard HDD is a magnetic low-end disk that provides roughly 500–2000 IOPS and 10–20 ms latency, which is orders of magnitude below SAP HANA's required performance for database persistence and log writes. It is appropriate for test/dev, cold storage, or accessibility scenarios, but using it for a production financial SAP HANA instance would cause severe I/O bottlenecks and recovery failures. Because SAP HANA expects high-speed block storage for a survival and savepoint process, Standard HDD is completely unsuitable here.
- ✗
Azure NetApp Files
Why it's wrong here
Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed NFS (or SMB) file service with excellent throughput, but SAP HANA on Azure only certifies native block-based managed disks, not file shares, for the database's data and log volumes. While NetApp may be used for SAP HANA in other contexts (e.g., on-premises or non-Azure clouds), in Azure it is not a supported storage type for HANA data/log files according to the SAP support matrix. Relying on it would create an unsupported and potentially volatile configuration for a financial services company.
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