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AWS: Don't be a SAP, get one of our massive HANA boxes

Cloud-slinger trots out 4TB instances for in-memory databases

Amazon Web Services has released a new line of server options aimed at companies looking to run in-memory databases like SAP HANA in its cloud.

The Bezos-backed hosting house said the EC2 instances will each offer 4TB of dedicated DDR4 memory. The instances, given the catchy name x1e.32xlarge, are available in the US East (northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU (Ireland) regions.

AWS says the new instances can be bought on demand or reserved through the AWS Marketplace, Management Console, CLI, or through the use of its SDKs.

The 4TB instances are part of the AWS X1 line of server instances designed to handle in-memory and high-performance applications. In addition to being certified for SAP HANA, the X1 instances are designed for applications like Apache Spark and hardware-intensive high-performance compute tasks.

Each of the instances will run on Xeon E7 8880 chips, contain a pair of 1,920GB SSDs, and sport 14Gbps networking capacity to EBS storage and 25Gbps links to other instances running within a single placement group.

"Many of our customers are already running production SAP applications on the existing x1.32xlarge instances," wrote AWS cloud evangelist Jeff Barr.

"With today's launch, these customers can now store and process far larger data sets, making them a great fit for larger production deployments."

Looking to meet a hefty customer appetite for in-memory database storage, AWS has been working to beef up the RAM capacity it offers for its X1 line. The introduction of the 4TB option comes a little more than a year after AWS debuted 2TB instances, and AWS said it has plans to ramp EC2 instance capacity up to 16TB in the near future.

Elsewhere in the world of SAP, IBM claims it now has the most powerful HANA certified bare metal boxes on the market. Big Blue's IBM Cloud boxes boast not only 8TB of memory, but also up to 8 Xeon E7-8890 processors to pack 192 cores on each box. ®

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