Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, has confirmed that the company’s X1 instances will pack up to 2TB of memory.
“On the high end, many of our enterprise customers are clamoring for instances that have very large amounts of memory,” Barr explained in a recent blog post. “They want to run SAP HANA and other in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, process giant graphs using Neo4j or Titan, or create enormous caches.”
As such, says Barr, X1 instances will feature up to 2 TB of memory, a full order of magnitude larger than the current generation of high-memory instances. Indeed, X1 instances are designed for demanding enterprise workloads including production installations of SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark and Presto.
The X1 instances will be powered by up to four Intel Xeon E7 processors with high memory bandwidth and large L3 caches – both designed to support high-performance, memory-bound applications.
“With over 100 vCPUs, these instances will be able to handle highly concurrent workloads with ease,” he added.
According to Diane Bryant, senior VP and general manager of Intel’s data center group, the X1 is “the first real use industry-wide of Xeon e7 microprocessor in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering.”
Meanwhile, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels confirmed the X1 instances pack Intel Haswell processors with more than 100 cores available.
Loren Shalinsky, a Strategic Development Director at Rambus, told us that including up to 2TB of memory per instance will help cover the current requirements of the vast majority of in-memory databases and other memory intensive applications.
“As Barr notes above, these include SAP HANA and other in-memory databases, the generation of analytics in real time, processing giant graphs using Neo4j or Titan, or the creation enormous caches,” he concluded.
Leave a Reply