AWS chucks 2TB X1 instances at SAP memory hogs

Amazon’s released AWS instances packing 2TB serving mega memory-hungry workloads such as SAP HANA.

The cloud provider today uncorked its X1 instances, which were first announced in October.

X1 instances use four Intel Xeon E7 2.3GHz processors with 10Gb per second of dedicated bandwidth and large L3 caches targeting high-performance, memory driven apps.

The biggest instance until now had been 200GB.

According to AWS, these big bandwidth, mega-memory instances are “ideal” for running in-memory databases like SAP’s HANA, plus Apache’s Spark or Presto.

The news comes in the wake of SAP announcing HANA is now ready as a certified – and therefore supported – option on Microsoft’s AWS rival, Azure.

X1s were already slated for delivery in the first half of 2016 but AWS was keen to point out SAP HANA on AWS was, all the same, just better.

“With 2TB of memory – 8 times the memory of any other available Amazon EC2 instance, and more memory than any SAP-certified cloud instance available today – X1 instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud,” Amazon claimed.

X1 instances are certified and available for SAP S/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA (SoH), and Business Warehouse on HANA.

Amazon reckoned customers could now, for the first time, run their most memory-intensive applications at scale on AWS.

Earlier this week, AWS rolled out a list of SAP customers running on its cloud earlier that included GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, Brooks Brothers and Zappos.com. ®