To stay competitive in highly dynamic markets, companies need to constantly reinvent themselves and their business models. Technology and enterprise software can deliver the flexibility they need to stay ahead of the curve by enabling innovation at scale.
As part of this, the move to the cloud for many businesses has become not a question of “if” but only “when.” In fact, a lot of companies have already adopted cloud for many parts of their business as they have come to understand the benefits of increased flexibility, scalability, speed, and elasticity to stay competitive. Simply put, cloud has become a key component to enable digital transformation.
We have been pleased to have been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of our trusted and longstanding partners, to bring cloud flexibility, speed, elasticity, and scale to our mutual customers for their SAP HANA workloads. From supporting SAP HANA on E5 commodity hardware back in 2012, to the first virtualized cloud-based AWS X1 instances leveraging a 4-socket design with 1, 2, and even 4 TB of RAM, working side-by-side we have accomplished many innovative breakthroughs together to reach that goal.
Even so, customers making the shift to the cloud have told us they want to be able to run even their largest in-memory databases in the cloud, ultra-close to the rest of the services interacting with these in-memory databases. Virtualization too has its limits with regards to the number of CPUs, memory sizes and performance that are supported, and this has often been a concern when it comes to moving larger workloads into the cloud.
Recently
AWS announced new Amazon EC2 High Memory instanceswith 6 TB, 9 TB and 12 TB of RAM as generally available, with even bigger instances to be added in 2019. These instances are powered by the latest generation of Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Skylake) processors optimized for mission-critical enterprise workloads, and are the first ever EC2 bare-metal instances to be offered on an 8-socket platform. Because these are bare-metal EC2 instances, customers can make full use of the compute power available. These highly performant systems have been
benchmarked and deliver over 480K SAP Application Performance Standard.
The new Amazon EC2 high memory instances are seamlessly integrated into the rest of AWS like storage, network, and other AWS services. This means customers can run and operate their SAP HANA applications in the cloud in the same software-defined Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as the rest of their enterprise applications, enabling lower latency, operational simplicity, and more predictable performance. This is important especially when it comes to real-time or big data applications where systems need highest performance and tight integration with other systems and applications.
Customers can launch, manage, and interact with these new instances through the AWS console and Command Line Interface/SDK. They can still easily move from one instance type to another in minutes. When it comes to sizing, customers thus still only need to buy infrastructure for what they need when they need it.
These new Amazon EC2 High Memory instances are already
certified by SAP for running SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, data mart solutions on SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments.
Combining AWS and SAP technologies, we are continuing to enhance the choices and experience for our customers to run their large, high performance SAP applications. With
EC2 High Memory instances, customers can now get the best of both worlds – the agility, flexibility, and technology choices that come with the cloud and the performance and scale needed for running large mission-critical SAP HANA deployments.