New – Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for Memory-Intensive Workloads with Higher Network Bandwidth

In 2016, we launched Amazon EC2 X1 instances designed for large-scale and in-memory applications in the cloud. The price per GiB of RAM for X1 instances is among the lowest. X1 instances are ideal for high performance computing (HPC) applications and running in-memory databases like SAP HANA and big data processing engines such as Apache Spark or Presto.

The following year, we launched X1e instances with up to 4 TiB of memory designed to run SAP HANA and other memory-intensive, in-memory applications. These 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.

Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of Amazon EC2 X2idn/X2iedn instances, built on the AWS Nitro system and featuring the third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) processors with up to 50 percent higher compute price performance than comparable X1 instances. These improvements result in up to 45 percent higher SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) performance than comparable X1 instances.

You might have noticed that we’re now using the “i” suffix in the instance type to specify that the instances are using an Intel processor, “e” in the memory-optimized instance family to indicate extended memory, “d” with local NVMe-based SSDs that are physically connected to the host server, and “n” to support higher network bandwidth up to 100 Gbps.

X2idn instances enable up to 2 TiB of memory, while X2iedn instances enable up to 4 TiB of memory. X2idn and X2iedn instances also support 100 Gbps of network performance with hardware-enabled VPC encryption and support 80 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth and 260k IOPs with EBS-encrypted volumes.

X2idn instances are ideal for running large in-memory databases such as SAP HANA. All of the X2idn instance sizes are certified by SAP for production HANA and S/4HANA workloads. In addition, X2idn instances are ideal for memory-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads such as Apache Spark and Presto, and for generating real-time analytics, processing giant graphs using Neo4j or Titan, or creating enormous caches.

X2iedn instances are optimized for applications that seek high memory to vCPU ratio and deliver the highest memory capacity per vCPU among all virtualized EC2 instance types. X2iedn is suited to run high-performance databases (such as Oracle DB, SQL server) and in-memory workloads (such as SAP HANA, Redis). Workloads that are sensitized to per-core licensing, such as Oracle DB, greatly benefit from the higher memory per vCPU (32GB:1vCPU) offered by X2iedn. X2iedn allows you to optimize licensing costs because it provides customers the same memory at half the number of vCPU compared to X2idn.

These instances offer the same amount of local storage as in X1/X1e, up to 3.8 TB, but the local storage in X2idn/X2iedn is NVMe-based, which will offer an order of magnitude lower latency compared to SATA SSDs in X1/X1e.

Things to Know
Here are some fun facts about the X2idn and X2iedn instances:

Optimizing CPU—You can disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like some HPC applications.

NUMA—You can make use of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) on X2idn and X2iedn instances. This advanced feature is worth exploring if you have a deep understanding of your application’s memory access patterns.

Available Now
X2idn instances are now available in the US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) Regions.

X2iedn instances are now available in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) Regions.

You can use On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Savings Plan, and Spot Instances. Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts are also available.

To learn more, visit our EC2 X2i Instances page, and please send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Channy