Amazon Web Services has introduced X1 instances, a new Memory Optimized instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). X1 instances have 2 TB of memory – the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today. Powered by four 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 (Haswell) processors delivering 128 vCPUs, X1 instances also offer up to 10 Gb per second of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), making them ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. X1 instances are certified and available for SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite on HANA (SoH), and SAP Business Warehouse on HANA (BWoH). To get started with X1 instances, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/. “Complex tasks which require massive computational resources and terabyte-scale memory – de novo genome assembly, sequence scanning and matching applications, and genomic variation annotation programs – will particularly benefit from being able to hold their database in memory.”
“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support virtually any workload,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2. “We've had a Memory Optimized instance family (our R3 family) for a while that is quite popular for high performance databases, in-memory analytics, and enterprise applications; however, customers have increasingly asked for even more memory to help run analytics on larger data sets with in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, and create very large caches. With 2 TB of memory – 8 times the memory of any other available Amazon EC2 instance, and more memory than any SAP-certified cloud instance available today – X1 instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”
