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Introducing Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases (preview)

Published Date
Author Jeff Barr

The new U7i instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids), the instances are now available in multiple AWS regions in preview form, in the US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Regions, as follows:

Instance Name vCPUs
 Memory (DDR5)
 EBS Bandwidth
 Network Bandwidth
u7in-16tb.224xlarge 896 16,384 GiB 100 Gbps 100 Gbps
u7in-24tb.224xlarge 896 24,576 GiB 100 Gbps 100 Gbps
u7in-32tb.224xlarge 896 32,768 GiB 100 Gbps 100 Gbps

We are also working on a smaller instance:

Instance Name vCPUs
 Memory (DDR5)
 EBS Bandwidth
 Network Bandwidth
u7i-12tb.224xlarge 896 12,288 GiB 60 Gbps 100 Gbps

Here’s what 32 TiB of memory looks like:

And here are the 896 vCPUs (and lots of other info):

When compared to the first generation of High Memory instances, the U7i instances offer up to 125% more compute performance and up to 120% more memory performance. They also provide 2.5x as much EBS bandwidth, giving you the ability to hydrate in-memory databases at a rate of up to 44 terabytes per hour.

Each U7i instance supports attachment of up to 128 General Purpose (gp2 and gp3) or Provisioned IOPS (io1 and io2 Block Express) EBS volumes. Each io2 Block Express volume can be as big as 64 TiB and can deliver up to 256K IOPS at up to 32 Gbps, making them a great match for the U7i instance.

On the network side, the instances support ENA Express and deliver up to 25 Gbps of bandwidth per network flow.

Supported operating systems include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server.

Join the Preview
If you are ready to put the U7i instances to the test in your environment, join the preview.

— Jeff;