Lower costs, improve reliability and availability, and increase performance for SAP workloads

There are more than 5000 active AWS customers running SAP on AWS.  We are always looking at how to lower cost, improve reliability & availability and increase performance for our customers.

In this blog, I am excited to share some recent great releases that have a significant impact on our SAP customers.

Increased SLA for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

Amazon EFS is ideal for hosting the SAP global file systems as the service is designed to be highly scalable, highly available, and highly durable. Amazon EFS file systems store data and metadata across multiple AZs in an AWS Region.

We recently increased the SLA for Amazon Elastic File System to 99.99%. This increase was part of supporting those customers who need the highest availability for their business critical SAP workloads.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to grow storage and to scale performance on your file systems

If you run SAP on Windows, then Amazon FSx for Windows Server is ideal for hosting the SAP Global File Systems. Amazon FSx provides a fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to increase the storage capacity and to change the throughput capacity with the click of a button. This provides you the flexibility to grow your file storage. It Also enables you to scale up, or down, available performance as needed to meet evolving storage needs over time.

Higher EBS and Networking performance and 1-year reservation purchase option on Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances

EC2 High Memory instances offer 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24-TB memory sizes. These instances are purpose-built to run the largest SAP HANA databases in the cloud. EC2 High Memory instances are SAP certified for HANA scale-up to 24 TB for OLTP and 18 TB for OLAP. In addition, EC2 High Memory instances are also SAP certified for S/4 HANA scale-out on the 6 TB and 12 TB instance sizes up to four nodes, and OLAP scale-out on the 6-TB instance size up to 16 nodes.

EC2 High Memory instances are now available with a 1-year reservation purchase option. This is in addition to the currently availability 3-year purchase option. This provides greater flexibility for our customers. For more details on pricing, visit this page.

We have also updated the EC2 High memory instances to offer higher storage and network bandwidth at no extra cost to our customers.

Following the update, each instance can drive 38 Gbps of dedicated storage bandwidth and a 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. This equates to a performance boost of up to 2X for storage bandwidth for all sizes. Also up to 4X for network bandwidth for 6 TB, 9 TB, and 12 TB instances.

You can now use the higher storage and network bandwidth to improve the system performance; including the HANA load time and backup duration of the HANA database.

To take advantage of tstorage improvements, we updated our recommended storage configuration for both gp2 and io1 volume types on the EC2 High Memory instances.

AWS Backint Agent

We recently launched the AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA that is available at no cost to our customers. You only pay for the underlying AWS services you use. You can now backup your SAP HANA databases in the cloud without the need for third-party backup tools.

During the preview launch of AWS BackInt Agent, APN Partner Msg Services AG shared the following feedback.

“With AWS Backint Agent we were able to increase our backup speed by a factor of 10”

The AWS Backint for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances.

AWS Backint Agent backs up your SAP HANA database to Amazon S3 and restores it using SAP management tools (SAP HANA Studio, SAP HANA Cockpit or SQL Commands). For more details, see AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA documentation.

Amazon EC2 price reduction – for Amazon EC2 instance saving plans and Standard Reserved instances

Customers can lower the costs of their AWS Cloud hosted SAP systems by taking advantage of Savings Plans or Reserved Instances.

We reduced the pricing for Standard Reserved instances and Amazon EC2 Instance Saving Plans across the M5, C5, and R5 EC2 instance families. These reductions offering up to 18% savings.

Amazon EC2 C5a instances powered by 2nd Generation AMD EPYC Processors and certified for SAP

We launched our new AMD EPYC based Amazon EC2 C5a instances. These instances offer the lowest cost per x86 vCPU in the Amazon EC2 portfolio. They also provide a reduction of 10% in terms of $ per SAPS.

All the C5a instances for supported for running SAP in 2-tier or 3-tier configurations. You can find more details in SAP Note 1656099 and access the SAP Benchmark results here.

C5a instances are available in eight virtualized sizes with up to 96 vCPUs and up to 192 GiB of memory – here are the specs:

Conclusion

That’s it for our round-up of the latest features on AWS that can bring meaningful benefits to our SAP customers. I hope this gives you some ideas on how to save cost, increase performance and offload complex existing processes onto dynamically scalable AWS services. Don’t hesitate to contact us with your comments or questions.