Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases

Announced in preview form at re:Invent 2023, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) U7i instances with up to 32 TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs are now available. Powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids), these high memory instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Here are the specs:

The new instances deliver the best compute price performance for large in-memory workloads, and offer the highest memory and compute power of any SAP-certified virtual instance from a leading cloud provider.

Thanks to AWS Nitro System, all of the memory on the instance is available for use. For example, here’s the 32 TiB instance:

In comparison to the previous generation of EC2 High Memory instances, the U7i instances offer more than 135% of the compute performance, up to 115% more memory performance, and 2.5x the EBS bandwidth. This increased bandwidth allows you to transfer 30 TiB of data from EBS into memory in an hour or less, making data loads and cache refreshes faster than ever before. The instances also support ENA Express with 25 Gbps of bandwidth per flow, and provide an 85% improvement in P99.9 latency between instances.

Each U7i instance supports attachment of up to 128 General Purpose (gp2 and gp3) or Provisioned IOPS (io1 and io2 Block Express) EBS volumes. Each io2 Block Express volume can be as big as 64 TiB and can deliver up to 256K IOPS at up to 32 Gbps, making them a great match for U7i instances.

The instances are SAP certified to run Business Suite on HANA, Business Suite S/4HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA (BW), and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments. To learn more, consult the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware and the SAP HANA to AWS Migration Guide. Also, be sure to take a look at the AWS Launch Wizard for SAP.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things that you should know about these new instances:

Regions – U7i instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney) AWS Regions.

Operating Systems – Supported operating systems include Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, and Windows Server.

Larger Instances – We are also working on offering even larger instance later this year with increased compute to meet our customer needs.

— Jeff;