Amazon EC2 X1 Instances

Designed for large-scale and in-memory applications in the cloud
Get Started with EC2 X1 Instances

Why Amazon EC2 X1 Instances?

X1 Instances are a part of the Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instance family and are designed for running large-scale and in-memory applications in the AWS Cloud. X1 instances offer up to 1,952 GiB of DRAM based memory. Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 (codenamed Haswell) processors and offers up to 128 vCPUs.

Compared to other EC2 instances, X1 instances have one of the lowest price per GiB of RAM, and are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. X1 instances are certified by SAP to run production environments of the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA, Business Suite on HANA (SoH), Business Warehouse on HANA (BW), and Data Mart Solutions on HANA on the AWS Cloud. Learn more.

Features

In addition to offering 1,952 GiB of DRAM based memory per instance, X1 instances feature 128 vCPUs and are powered by Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 processors that feature high memory bandwidth and larger L3 caches to boost the performance of in-memory applications. X1 instances also enable increased cryptographic performance via the latest Intel AES-NI feature, support Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) to boost the performance of in-memory transactional data processing, and support Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel AVX2) processor instructions to expand most integer commands to 256 bits.

X1 instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth. X1 instances also feature up to 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) at no additional cost.

SAP HANA production environments are certified for use with Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) or Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes. Refer to SAP HANA on AWS for additional details on the certified EBS storage configurations.

X1 instances support Single Device Data Correction (SDDC +1), which detects and corrects multi-bit errors. SDDC +1 uses error checking and correction code to identify and disable a failed single DRAM device.

In addition, you can implement High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions to meet Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and cost requirements by leveraging Amazon CloudFormation and Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery. Learn more.

For production SAP HANA environments, you can also use HANA System Replication (HSR) on X1 instances. Learn more about architecting SAP HANA HA and DR.

X1 instances extend the elasticity, simplicity, and cost savings of the AWS Cloud to enterprise-grade applications with large dataset requirements. You can launch X1 instances as On-Demand or Reserved Instances (see purchasing options), which can help you run your workloads at a lower cost. You can also leverage AWS Quick Starts, AWS CloudFormation, and other AWS management services to easily and quickly provision X1 instances. Learn more about SAP HANA Migration to AWS.