Optimizing Epic on AWS: R8i instances deliver 20-30% cost savings with enhanced SMP performance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) r8i.96xlarge instances for healthcare workloads, delivering significant cost optimization alongside enhanced performance capabilities for large-scale deployments.

Improved cost efficiency for healthcare organizations

Based on a recent analysis by AWS and Epic for health systems, the r8i.96xlarge instance offers an estimated 20 to 30 percent cost reduction for healthcare organizations compared to u7i-6tb.112xlarge instances. The r8i.96xlarge supports Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP) deployments up to 110 million global references per second (GRefs/s), making it ideal for cost-conscious healthcare organizations seeking to optimize infrastructure investments while maintaining robust performance for mission-critical applications.

For healthcare organizations requiring ECP deployments beyond 110M GRefs/s, u7i-6tb.112xlarge instances support up to 140M GRefs/s, providing flexibility to match infrastructure choices with specific workload requirements.

Enhanced symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) performance

The r8i.96xlarge instance has demonstrated improved symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) performance, achieving 49 million GRefs/s—an increase from the previous maximum of 44 million GRefs/s. This 11% performance improvement for vertical sizing using SMP, which processes more work by adding central processing unit (CPU) cores and memory to a single instance.

Technical specifications

The r8i.96xlarge is powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors built specifically for AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a lightweight hypervisor that provides improved compute and networking performance, enabling efficient and flexible cloud services with enhanced security, isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage.

The r8i.96xlarge features up to 384 vCPUs and 3TB memory—double the maximum size of seventh generation instances—providing healthcare organizations with greater capacity for their largest deployments. The instance leverages dedicated Nitro EBS Cards for storage bandwidth and Nitro VPC Cards for network bandwidth, ensuring consistent performance for I/O intensive healthcare workloads.

When combined with Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, the r8i.96xlarge delivers sub-millisecond latency and consistent performance for demanding healthcare applications. io2 Block Express is the next generation of EBS storage server architecture, purpose-built to meet the performance requirements of mission-critical workloads.

Getting started

To learn more or request access to r8i.96xlarge instances, contact your AWS sales representative.

For more information, visit the AWS healthcare industry solutions page.

Epic is a trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.