back to article 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- …

  1. hellwig
    Paris Hilton

    I admittedly know nothing about AWS, but is it really an "instance" if it consumes the entirety of the resources on the physical computer? If you're running a critical database, you probably aren't running temporal instances of that service, are you? You're just leasing hardware from Amazon at that point, right? How can you rollover failures or transfer instances for services that run entirely in memory?

    1. sixoseven

      An instance is an instance. There's really not much more to think about. If you think an instance might fail, then you have a backup instance. You can have it in parallel, you could have it on hot-standby, you could have a smart data management workflow that breaks up your computing task determined by what's on disk and what's in memory. SAP HANA looks like a shardable k-safe database, thus the problem is solved with the database architecture itself, not with how you host it. I have an Oracle white paper that excoriates HANA's implementation and it has some legitimate points, but really the more you get deep into that debate, the more the simplicity of Amazon's Redshift becomes desirable.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An x1.32xlarge instance has 128 vCPUs, 1952GB RAM, and costs $16 per hour. Pretty awesome.

    I would guess they still run the instance inside a hypervisor, even if there is only one per box, so that they can send signals to the instance (e.g. shut it down), handle the virtual networking etc.

    1. Bill M

      $140,000 per annum

      I make that $140,000 per annum. Have I done my maths right ?

      1. DonL

        Re: $140,000 per annum

        Indeed, or you can just buy your own server for around $100.000 and run it for 5 years saving you at least $400.000. It would take less than 9 months to reach the break-even point.

        ( http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=6636692#!tab=models )

        But hey, CAPEX is bad and OPEX is good right?

        1. Jon 37

          Re: $140,000 per annum

          But Amazon headline prices are for flexible capacity. If you know you're going to use the instance constantly, you can get a discount.

          At the simplest level, if you commit to a 1 year term then you can pay $6700/month instead of $9600/month.

          If you know you're going to want the server for 3 years then a one-off upfront payment of $98000 will cover it. Or if you don't want to pay so much upfront then you can pay roughly half the upfront amount ($52000) and the rest at $1400/month over the 3 year term, which comes to a total of $104000. Either way, the cost is roughly $100k, which is roughly what you say it would cost to buy the server yourself.

          (Source for AWS pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ set to the default US East region).

          And the price for the server yourself doesn't include datacenter space or power or networking gear or Internet access, although the AWS price doesn't include Internet data transfer fees.

          If you have a hardware issue with the server, with Amazon you can just spin the virtual machine up on another one of their servers, at no extra cost; you can't do that with your in-house server unless you spend money on a spare. Also, if you need a spare server due to a busy period, or for testing a software update, then you can always spin up another server on Amazon for a few days (at the spot price).

          There are advantages to both in-house and in-cloud servers; but the cost difference isn't as much as you're making out.

  3. David 132 Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Must stop glancing at headlines

    I read the headline for this article in my newsreader, and my poor feeble brain mis-processed it as

    AWS chucks ZX81 instances at SAP memory hogs

    which meant I just had to read the article to figure out, WTF?

    Sorry to interrupt.

    1. Simon Brady

      Re: Must stop glancing at headlines

      Well for all we know, there could be 2,046,820,352 ZX81s providing that 1952GB, with 15,990,784 clustered together for each vCPU (because not even Amazon with their "everything fails, all the time" design philosophy would trust those dodgy RAM expansion cartridges).

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Must stop glancing at headlines

        Indeed, one RAMpack wobble and your SAP data is toast.

        Do Amazon charge extra if the ZX81 instances are in FAST mode vs. SLOW, I wonder?

        (Sorry, I didn't mean to take this discussion off-topic. I shall now return you to the discussion about SAP for which you came here!)

  4. DNinjaDave

    vCPU:Core ratio

    Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 (Haswell) processors and offers 128 vCPUs.

    Those E7 8880 v3's have 18 Cores per CPU or 36 Threads so their vCPU count of 128 means they must be using hyper-threading to achieve the vCPU count. Or roughly 2:1 vCPU to Core.

    Do their other offerings that give you 2 vCPUs for instance mean you have 1 physical core with HT or 2 physical cores I wonder?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: vCPU:Core ratio

      > Do their other offerings that give you 2 vCPUs for instance mean you have 1 physical core with HT or 2 physical cores I wonder?

      GIYF.

      https://samrueby.com/2015/01/12/what-are-amazon-aws-vcpus/

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like