AWS Launches the Largest EC2 Example With X1 Addition

Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is used for large memory-intensive workloads, now offers a new instance option: The 4TB x1e.32xlarge.
Wednesday’s announcement of the new Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) instance was made. It is now the third largest and most popular in AWS’ X1 collection of SAP HANA-certified instances. All three instances of X1 are capable of running large, enterprise-class, in memory database workloads including SAP HANA.
According to AWS, they also have the lowest price per GiB RAM among Amazon EC2 instances types.
The new x1e.32xlarge supports 128 virtual CPUs and has 3.9TB DDR4 memory. It is AWS’ largest cloud-native instance and is “supported” by SAP for production HANA deployments (SAP Business Suite on HANA, SAP Business Warehouse on HANA and the next-generation SAP BW/4HANA ERP and data warehouse solution,” said Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist.
Comparatively, the x1.32xlarge, the oldest and largest X1 instance, was launched last May with 2TB memory and support 128 virtual CPUs.
The smallest X1 instance, x1.16xlarge was released last October with 976GiB memory and support up to 64 virtual CPUs.
The x1e.32xlarge as well as the x1.32xlarge have two 1,920GB SSD volumes. They run on four Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 Haswell CPUs. The x1.16xlarge has one 1,920GB SSD volume. It runs on two Intel processors.
According to AWS, the x1e.32xlarge can only be used by users of AWS virtual personal clouds (VPCs). It is supported out of the Northern Virginia and Oregon, Ireland, and Tokyo regions.