In-Memory Computing Revolutionised by AWS U7i

Amazon EC2 U7i

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) U7i instances with up to 32 TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs are now available, having been unveiled in preview. These high memory instances, which are driven by specially engineered fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids), are intended to serve big, in-memory databases, such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Amazon EC2 U7i specs

Instance Name	vCPUs	Memory (DDR5)	EBS Bandwidth	Network Bandwidth
u7i-12tb.224xlarge	896	12,288 GiB	60 Gbps	100 Gbps
u7in-16tb.224xlarge	896	16,384 GiB	100 Gbps	200 Gbps
u7in-24tb.224xlarge	896	24,576 GiB	100 Gbps	200 Gbps
u7in-32tb.224xlarge	896	32,768 GiB	100 Gbps	200 Gbps

What makes Amazon EC2 so special?

With over 750 instances and a selection of the newest processors, storage, networking, operating systems, and pricing models to help you best match the requirements of your workload, Amazon Elastic computational Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the broadest and deepest computational platform available. Amazon is the first cloud provider with 400 Gbps Ethernet networking, the first major cloud provider to support AMD, Intel, and Arm processors, and the only cloud offering on-demand EC2 Mac instances. Amazon provide the lowest cost per inference instance in the cloud along with the highest pricing performance for machine learningmachine learning training. AWS supports more workloads related to Windows, SAP, the HPC, and machine learning than any other cloud.

The new instances offer the most memory and computation capacity of any SAP-certified virtual instance from a top cloud provider, and they also deliver the greatest compute pricing performance for big in-memory workloads.

AWS Nitro System

All of the instance’s memory is usable because of Amazon Nitro System. Here is the 32 TiB instance, for illustration:

Amazon Nitro Framework

The foundation of Amazon’s upcoming generation of EC2 instances, the AWS Nitro System, allows AWS to innovate more quickly, further lower costs for Amazon’s clients, and provide additional instance kinds and enhanced security, among other benefits.

Amazon has a whole new virtualization infrastructure thanks to AWS. Conventionally, hypervisors offer a wide range of administration functions, virtualize the CPU, storage, and networking, and safeguard the actual hardware and BIOS. Amazon can separate those operations, transfer them to specialised hardware and softwarehardware and software, and lower expenses by providing your instances with nearly all of a server’s resources thanks to the Nitro System.

Advantages

Quicker invention

Amazon can rapidly and efficiently develop EC2 instanceEC2 instance types with growing computing, storage, memory, and networking capabilities with the Nitro System. The System is a versatile set of building elements. Additionally, this invention paves the way for bare metal scenarios in which clients are free to supply their own or no hypervisor.

Increased protection

Enhanced security is offered by the Nitro System, which continuously checks, safeguards, and validates the firmware and hardware of the instance. The attack surface is reduced by offloading virtualization resources to specialised hardware and software. Last but not least, the security model of Nitro System is shut down and forbids administrative access, removing the chance of tampering and human error.

Enhanced functionality and cost

Your instances will run better overall since the Nitro System provides nearly all of the host hardware’s computation and memory resources to them. Moreover, high-speed networking, high-speed EBS, and I/O acceleration are made possible by specific Nitro Cards. More savings that can be transferred to the customer result from not needing to reserve resources for management software.

Support for instances from earlier generations

The AWS Nitro System can prolong the duration of operation beyond the standard lifespan of underlying hardware by supporting EC2 instances from earlier generations. By offering clients the ability to execute their workloads on the instance families they were created on, the AWS Nitro System gives customers access to cutting-edge hardware and software components for EC2 instances.

The Amazon EC2 U7i instances provide up to 115% greater memory performance, 2.5 times the EBS bandwidth, and more than 135% more compute performance than the previous generation of EC2 High Memory instances. With this improved capacity, data loads and cache refreshes can happen faster than ever before you can move 30 TiB of data from EBS into memory in an hour or less. The instances offer an 85% reduction in P99.9 latency across instances and support ENA Express with 25 Gbps of bandwidth per flow.

ENA Express

Amazon have made every effort to provide you with the network performance and bandwidth that you can utilise to the fullest extent possible. Network bandwidth increased over time, from 250 Mbps on the first m1 instance to 200 Gbps on the most recent m6in instances. Amazon have added advanced networking features like Enhanced Networking, Elastic Network Adapters (ENAs), and Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFAs) (for tightly connected HPC applications) in addition to sheer bandwidth.

AWS ENA Express

Announcing ENA Express

Amazon is introducing ENA Express today. ENA Express increases the maximum single-flow capacity from 5 Gbps to 25 Gbps and decreases P99 latency of traffic flows by up to 50% and P99.9 latency by up to 85% (compared to TCP), building on the Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol that currently drives Elastic Fabric Adapters. In summary, you get significantly less unpredictability and a lot more per-flow capacity.

To benefit from this performance immediately for TCP and UDP traffic between c6gn instances running in the same Availability Zone, you can enable ENA Express on both new and old ENAs.

Using ENA Express

Using ENA Express To set up and test ENA Express, Jeff Barr used two c6gn instances. He enabled ENA Express for both instances using the AWS Management Console after he launched the instances. He locate every ENI, pick it, and then from the Actions menu, select Manage ENA Express:

Up to 128 General Purpose (GP2 and GP3) or Provisioned IOPS (IO1 and IO2 Block Express) EBS volumes can be attached to each Amazon EC2 U7i instance. io2 Block Express volumes are a perfect fit for Amazon EC2 U7i instances because each one can hold up to 64 TiB and give up to 256K IOPS at up to 32 Gbps.

The instances are certified by SAP to operate SAP BW/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA, Business Suite S/4HANA, and Business Warehouse on HANA (BW) in production settings. Refer to the SAP HANA to AWS to AWS Migration Guide and the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware for additional information. Don’t forget to look at the SAP AWS Launch Wizard as well.