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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Amazon EC2 High Memory instances which are part of the Memory Optimized Instance Category. The new instances are purpose-built to run large in-memory workloads, including SAP HANA. The SUSE and Amazon engineering teams collaborated to ensure SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Server for SAP Applications were supported on the day of the release in the Amazon Marketplace. Below are the new instance type vCPU, RAM and bandwidth specifications, as well a link with all the instance families available on the AWS platform:
Link to the entire Amazon Web Services Instance family.
New Instance Performance Perks
The new High Memory Instances have introduced quite a few innovations and improvements when compared to the previous Memory Optimized Instances: X1 and X1e that greatly improve high memory workloads such as SAP HANA. The improvements to the instances have resulted in a new benchmark of 480,600 SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) for the 6 TiB instance (u-6tb1) up from the previous best 131,500 SAPS for the x1e.32xlarge which has 3,904 GiB of RAM and 128 virtual cores.
Below are just a few improvements introduced with the new instance type.
- Upgraded Processing: The EC2 High Memory instances are the first Amazon EC2 instances powered by an 8-socket platform with the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8176M (Skylake) processors. The previous X1 and X1e High frequency Intel Xeon E7-8880 v3 (Haswell) processors. Previously the highest available vCPU count was 128, but now customers can deploy SUSE Linux enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on systems with 448 hyperthreaded cores (224 physical cores).
- Increased Memory: Previously the highest memory available was 1,952 GiB in memory available on the x1.32xlarge instance. With the introduction of the new instances, customers can choose to run the 448 logical cores with 6TiB, 9 TiB or 12 TiB.
- Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Network Bandwidth: The systems are designed with the key service level agreements for dedicated EBS and network bandwidths. EBS has a dedicated 14 Gbps connection to ensure optimum disk performance and a separate 25 Gbps for networking.
- High Memory Instance SAP Benchmark
Cloudy Infrastructure
It’s important that cloud service providers update their infrastructure to meet customer requirements. It is just as important that the new systems introduced are available through the standard APIs and/or the administrator control panel. Amazon Web Services provides you the same management experience when managing instances ranging from the t3.nano with 0.5 GiB of RAM to the systems which start at 6 TiB of RAM. This is an important detail since the new High Memory Instances are bare metal servers based on Amazon’s Nitro technology which is a combination of AWS-built hardware and software components that provide customer’s full access to the hardware resources.
The High Memory Instances are a new variation from other Nitro (bare metal) instances since the High Memory Instances use EBS storage as opposed to other Nitro instances which use local NVMe. This difference allows the High Memory Instances to support terabytes of datasets which makes the systems ideal for running large enterprise databases, including SAP Certified production installations of SAP HANA in-memory database in the cloud. Additionally, AWS has integrated the new instance type into the SAP HANA Quick Start Deployment. It provides customers and partners the ability to launch an SAP HANA High Availability cluster using SUSE Linux Enterprise Sever for SAP Applications.
To learn more about review the Quick Start documentation as well as a SUSE and Amazon created white paper outlining the best practice for SAP HANA SR Performance Optimized Scenario on the AWS Cloud.
If you have any questions please email us at aws@suse.com.
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