Now Available – EC2 Instances with 4 TB of Memory

Earlier this year I told you about our plan to launch EC2 instances with up to 16 TB of memory. Today I am happy to announce that the new x1e.32xlarge instances with 4 TB of DDR4 memory are available in four AWS Regions. As I wrote in my earlier post, these instances are designed to run SAP HANA and other memory intensive, in-memory applications. Many of our customers are already running production SAP applications on the existing x1.32xlarge instances. With today’s launch, these customers can now store and process far larger data sets, making them a great fit for larger production deployments.

Like the x1.32xlarge, the x1e.32xlarge is powered by quad socket Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 Haswell processors running at 2.3GHz (128 vCPUs), with large L3 caches, plenty of memory bandwidth, and support for C-state and P-state management.

On the network side, the instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth when launched within an EC2 placement group, powered by the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), with support for up to 8 Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) per instance. The instances are EBS-optimized by default, with an additional 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to your EBS volumes, and support for up to 80,000 IOPS per instance. Each instance also includes a pair of 1,920 GB SSD volumes.

A Few Notes
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding the x1e.32xlarge:

SAP Certification – The x1e.32xlarge instances are our largest cloud-native instances certified and supported by SAP for production HANA deployments of SAP Business Suite on HANA (SoH), SAP Business Warehouse on HANA (BWoH), and the next-generation SAP S/4HANA ERP and SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse solution. If you are already running SAP HANA workloads on smaller X1 instances, scaling up will be quick and easy. The SAP HANA on the AWS Cloud Quick Start Reference Deployment has been updated and will help you to set up a deployment that follows SAP and AWS standards for high performance and reliability. The SAP HANA Hardware Directory and the SAP HANA Sizing Guidelines are also relevant.

Reserved Instances – The regional size flexibility for Reserved Instances does not apply across x1 and x1e.

Now Available
The x1e.32xlarge instances can be launched in On-Demand and Reserved Instance form via the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, and AWS Marketplace in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions.

I would also like to make you aware of a couple of other upgrades to the X1 instances:

EBS – As part of today’s launch, existing X1 instances also support up to 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to EBS, along with 80,000 IOPS per instance.

Network – Earlier this week, we announced that existing x1.32xlarge instances also support up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth within placement groups.

— Jeff;