You have been asked to design the storage layer for an application. The application requires the disk performance to be at least 100000 IOPS. The data should be highly available without data loss, even when an availability zone has an outage. The volume you provide must have a capacity of at least 2 TB. Which of the following designs will meet these objectives?

Answer options:

A.Instantiate an i2.8xlarge instance in us-east-1a. Create a RAID 0 volume using the four 800GB SSD disks provided with the instance. Provision 3×1 TB EBS volumes attach them to the instance and configure them as a second RAID 0 volume. Configure synchronous, block-level replication from the ephemeral backed volume to the EBS-backed volume.
B.Instantiate an i2.8xlarge instance in us-east-1a. Create a RAID 0 volume using the four 800GB SSD disks provided with the Instance Configure synchronous block-level replication to an identically configured instance in us-east-1b.
C.Instantiate a c3.8xlarge instance in us-east-1. Provision an AWS Storage Gateway and configure it for 3 TB of storage and 100,000 IOPS. Attach the volume to the instance.
D.Instantiate a c3.8xlarge instance in us-east-1 provision 4x1TB EBS volumes, attach them to the instance, and configure them as a single RAID 5 volume. Ensure that EBS snapshots are performed every 15 minutes.
E.Instantiate a c3 8xlarge Instance in us-east-1 Provision 3x1TB EBS volumes, attach them to the instance, and configure them as a single RAID 0 volume. Ensure that EBS snapshots are performed every 15 minutes.

Answer - B
Option A is incorrect because this configuration is done entirely in a single AZ. There will be a data loss if the entire AZ goes down.
Option B is CORRECT because (a) it uses RAID 0 configuration that utilizes all the volumes and gives the aggregated IOPS performance, and (b) the replication across another AZ gives higher availability and fault tolerance even in case of an entire AZ becomes unavailable.
Option C is incorrect because it uses an asynchronous backup of the data. The problem scenario demands a synchronous replication to prevent any data loss.
Option D is incorrect because RAID 5 is not recommended for Amazon EBS since the parity write operations consume some of the IOPS available to the volumes. See the links below for more details.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/raid-config.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Option E is incorrect because, even if the snapshots are taken every 15 minutes, there are chances that there will be data loss during this time. The requirement is that there should be absolutely no data loss.