News

AWS Caters to SAP HANA In-Memory Database with High-Memory Computing Instances

• By David Ramel
• 10/01/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced new high-memory instances for its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) services.

Now available are Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 6 TB, 9 TB and 12 TB capacity, while even larger instances -- 18 TB and 24 TB -- will be available next year.

While the new high-memory instances are said to be purpose-built for the running of large in-memory databases in the age of Big Data and advanced, real-time analytics, it was the SAP HANA RDBMS that was called out for special attention by AWS. Targeting cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments, SAP HANA uses in-memory data wrangling to combine online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) functionality in one offering.

"Amazon EC2 High Memory instances are certified by SAP for running Business Suite on HANA, the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments," AWS said in a blog post.

AWS said the performance of such high-end analytics projects is boosted even further when the applications using the database are executed in the same Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as the database, which is said to reduce overhead and ensure predictable performance.

"With 12 TB instances available in AWS, and 24 TB instances coming next year, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances give our customers the ability to scale their in-memory database with predictable performance in the same VPC as their other AWS services," said Matt Garman, vice president of Compute Services at AWS, in a statement. "Customers can grow their in-memory database and easily connect it to their storage, networking, analytics, IoT, and machine learning services -- helping them make faster and better business decisions.”

The new High Memory instances are available as bare-metal instances on EC2 Dedicated Hosts on a three-year reservation in the US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions, AWS said.