05.16.2016
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced the availability of X1 instances, a new Memory Optimized instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). X1 instances have 2 TB of memory – the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today. Powered by four 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 (Haswell) processors delivering 128 vCPUs, X1 instances also offer up to 10 Gb per second of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), making them ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. X1 instances are certified and available for SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite on HANA (SoH), and SAP Business Warehouse on HANA (BWoH). To get started with X1 instances, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/.
“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support virtually any workload,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2. “We’ve had a Memory Optimized instance family (our R3 family) for a while that is quite popular for high performance databases, in-memory analytics, and enterprise applications; however, customers have increasingly asked for even more memory to help run analytics on larger data sets with in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, and create very large caches. With 2 TB 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. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”
AWS customers, across virtually every industry and geography, are running SAP applications on the AWS Cloud and experiencing the agility, scalability, security, and cost savings of the world’s most comprehensive cloud platform for their business applications. Earlier this week, AWS shared that GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, Brooks Brothers, Ferrara Candy Company, GPT Group, Hoya Corporation, Lionsgate, Macmillan Publishers India, RWE Czech Republic, Zappos.com, and Bart & Associates Inc., are among the many customers running SAP on AWS.
Founded in 1818, Brooks Brothers is a leading retailer of fashion wear and accessories in the United States. “Our company already uses AWS for key business-critical SAP applications powered by HANA on AWS,” says Sahal Laher, Executive Vice President and CIO, Brooks Brothers. “With the addition of X1 instances with 2 TB of memory, we’ll be able to rapidly deploy new SAP solutions like S/4HANA, Supply Chain Management (SCM / APO), as well as Fashion Management (FMS) powered by HANA in production on AWS. We’re looking forward to realizing the same benefits with X1 that we’ve experienced thus far with the AWS Cloud, which has allowed us to put greater focus on areas of our business that drive revenue.”
DNAnexus provides scientific stack and data management services, enabling collaborative research to rapidly deliver insights from high resolution genomics, molecular, imaging, and clinical data. “The new X1 instances will be a powerful addition for genomic workflows with high memory demands,” said Omar Serang, Chief Cloud Officer, DNAnexus, Inc. “Complex tasks which require massive computational resources and terabyte-scale memory – de novo genome assembly, sequence scanning and matching applications, and genomic variation annotation programs – will particularly benefit from being able to hold their database in memory.”
Rescale offers industry leading software platforms and hardware infrastructure for companies to perform scientific and engineering simulations. “Our customers are using cloud infrastructure at increasingly large scale, at times launching tens of thousands of CPU cores to run critical engineering simulations,” said Joris Poort, CEO, Rescale. “Some of the engineering applications, in particular circuit and silicon logic simulations, large acoustic models, and electromagnetic frequency analysis, require very large amounts of localized memory near the CPU core for optimal performance. The new X1 instance addresses the needs of these applications, giving teams the ability to run a wider range of simulations, including higher fidelity models, to improve design quality and speed up simulations to reduce product development time.”
X1 instances are available today by customer request in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Germany), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months.
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