Amazon EC2 M6i instances now available and SAP certified

This post was jointly authored by Steven Jones, General Manager of SAP/VMware at AWS, and Anurag Handa, General Manager of Cloud & Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel

Deliver better performance for mission-critical SAP workloads with Amazon EC2 M6i Instances

AWS and Intel recently announced the launch of our new Amazon EC2 M6i instances, which are certified for SAP NetWeaver workloads in production. These are the first generally available, SAP-certified cloud instances that are built on 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, as documented in SAP note 1656099.

These instances offer up to a 20% increase in memory bandwidth and a 10% increase in price/performance compared to previous generation (M5) instances, and give AWS customers access to  Intel features exclusive to 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, such as Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME) and AVX-512. They are available in 9 different sizes, with up to 128 vCPUs and up to 500GB of RAM. Full performance details are as follows:

The m6i.32xlarge offers up to 198,080 SAPS per instance, as recently demonstrated using the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark. This calculation was reviewed and certified by the SAP benchmark council.

Why SAP customers continue to choose AWS and Intel

This release is the latest milestone in AWS and Intel’s 10+ year partnership co-innovating for SAP customers on the cloud. Today, thousands of customers run SAP on EC2 instances powered by Intel Xeon for a multitude of reasons, including experience, choice, reliability, and security. Let’s talk a bit about each.

First is our unmatched experience supporting SAP and SAP customers in the cloud. In 2008, SAP started using AWS and Intel-based EC2 instances to support their own innovation journey. In 2011, we partnered to work with SAP and certified early EC2 instances (m2.4xlarge) for SAP Business Suite production workloads. We shortly followed with the certification of EC2 instances for SAP HANA in 2013, and together, AWS and Intel have continued to break new ground in this space since. For example, when we announced Amazon EC2 X1 instances in 2016, they were the first multi-terabyte capable cloud instances purpose-built for memory-intensive workloads like large SAP HANA databases. And at the same time, SAP HANA was optimized on Intel architecture. This experience and consistent pace of innovation is a key reason that industry leaders continue to choose AWS and EC2 instances powered by Intel for their mission-critical SAP workloads. For example, BP runs a very large 16TB production SAP system that underpins its mission-critical, 24×7 fuels business on AWS.

Another reason is the broad choice of instance types, which allows you to optimize costs by aligning your unique workload requirements with the right blend of CPU and memory. For example, Zalora started with 244GB EC2 instances to support their HANA database, and within two years, had expanded their cloud consumption by nearly 900 percent. Now they run on much larger 2 TB Amazon EC2 X1 instances. FAST Retailing— the parent company of Uniqlo— uses 4 and 6 TB Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances to support their continued business growth, and can change instance sizes in minutes with minimal downtime.

And of course, customers choose AWS because it is the world’s most secure, reliable, and extensive cloud platform, and Amazon EC2 instances powered by Intel are a cornerstone of the AWS infrastructure. The AWS Global Infrastructure has 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions (with 2x more regions with multiple AZs than the next closest provider) — and we have plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in the near future. Customers can take advantage of this infrastructure footprint to build highly available SAP systems far more easily and cost-effectively than is possible on-premises.

Get started with M6i today

Customers can start using our M6i instances via EC2 Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. These instances are generally available today in AWS US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions.

To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the M6i instances page, or visit the Intel 3rd Gen Intel Xeon processor page.

Thanks,
Steve and Anurag