Last December, we announced general availability of Azure M-series Virtual Machines with memory configuration from 1 TB to 4 TB, offering on-demand scalability and agility for workloads requiring large memory consumption. We recently announced SAP HANA certification for M-series VMs, enabling you to run production SAP HANA workloads with a pay-as-you-go, per second VM billing. Customers can now deploy entire SAP landscapes in minutes with Azure automation templates like this one from our partner, SUSE, offering unprecedented agility for SAP HANA applications with error-free setup following reference architecture guidance. With Azure Reserved VM Instances, you can save up to 72% on the M-series VMs when running in Azure. Agile, inexpensive, and certified. 

Given the excitement we have seen from customers on this SKU, we have been steadily launching M-series VMs all over the world. Today, I’m excited to announce that M-series VMs are now generally available in four more regions: Australia East, Australia Southeast, Japan East, Japan West. This adds to availability in US East 2, US West 2, West Europe, UK South, Southeast Asia and US Gov Virginia. M-series VMs are now available and GA in 10 regions worldwide with plans for 12 additional regions later this year, doubling our global capacity for SAP HANA certified VMs in 6 months. For details on M-series general availability by regions, please check out more details about Azure service region availability.

Azure has the largest spectrum of SAP certified offerings in the public cloud with 16 different configurations for customers to choose. The M-series VM is certified for 4 TB or less, which matches the upper bound of what other clouds offer today. To support larger workloads, Azure pioneered a purpose-built bare-metal large instance, offering up to 20 TB in memory for a single node scale-up configuration, the largest available of any public cloud. Azure is also certified for a scale-out configuration for up to 60 TB with a 15+1 node configuration of 4TB instances, offering the largest scale-out in any public cloud in a cost-effective configuration. For the scale-out BW deployment, given our unique bare metal offering, Azure is the only public cloud provider to offer a 99.99% SLA.

We continue to lead the industry in offering you the best choice, scale, and SLA in the public cloud and with our region expansion this year, we will offer the largest global footprint for SAP HANA certified VMs of any public cloud. 

Given this, we are see very exciting results from our customers. Rio Tinto, a global metals and mining company, migrated mission critical SAP applications and realized 30% reduction in IT operating costs with increased agility to meet peak SAP application usage. Penti, a fast-growing Turkish retailer, will run S/4HANA on Azure to ensure service availability, maximize data security and reduce operational costs while increasing business agility. Guyana Goldfields, a Canadian gold producer, is estimating 40% reduction in SAP ERP maintenance costs by using Azure for S/4HANA and SAP applications.
 
If you want to learn more:

• Check SAP’s certification site where you can find the full list of our SAP HANA certifications on Azure.
• See our recently published SAP Migration to Azure whitepaper to learn how to migrate your SAP applications to the cloud.
• Review more details on running SAP applications on Azure. 

Thanks, 
Corey