Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), five months after launching its smallest EC2 type, unveiled Wednesday its largest — the X1.
This first X1 instance (x1.32xlarge) is a memory-optimized instance designed to support heavy workloads and Big Data engines, high performance computing, and in-memory database. It supports SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Suite on HANA, and also supports SAP Business Warehouse on HANA.
The x1.32xlarge, which has 2TB of memory, is eight times larger than AWS’ other EC2 instances and has more memory than other cloud vendors SAP-optimized instances. The new instance is powered by four Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 Haswell CPUs and supports up to 128 virtual processors. It also offers 10Gbps dedicated bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store.
AWS announced the X1 in time with this year’s SAP Sapphire Now conference, Orlando, Fla., to emphasize its compatibility with SAP.
In a prepared statement, Matt Garman, vice-president of Amazon EC2, stated that “X1 instances” will change the game for SAP workloads in cloud. Customers can now run their most memory-intensive apps at scale using the flexibility, reliability, and reliability of AWS Cloud. This is a significant improvement over having to deal with the complexity, cost, lack of agility, and lack thereof of colo or on premises solutions.
In this blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, briefly illustrates an example SAP HANA workload running on an X1 instance. AWS also offers a SAP HANA installation guide here.
AWS datacenters located in Northern Virginia currently have the x1.32xlarge available.
, Oregon
Ireland
Frankfurt
Tokyo
, Singapore
Sydney and other regions are in the pipeline.
Pricing starts at $3.97 an hour under AWS’ three-year Partial Upfront Reserved Instance Plan.
AWS launched the SAP-optimized X1 as its cloud rival Microsoft announced its partnership with SAP. Microsoft, whose Azure public clouds are becoming more challenging AWS, announced Tuesday that it is partnering with SAP to support SAP HANA workloads running on Azure.
