Announcing 4 TB for SAP HANA, Single-Instance SLA and Hybrid Use Benefit Images

Today, I’m excited to announce three new Azure enhancements to enable you to run the largest enterprise workloads, offer you best-in-class support for those workloads, and deliver it at the lowest possible cost.

• At Ignite, we announced the general availability of large instances, specifically designed for SAP HANA workloads scaling up to 3TB per node on Azure. We are now announcing even larger scale, offering 4TB on a single node for OLTP scenarios and 32 TB for multi-node scale-out OLAP deployments, both available in December 2016.
• We are constantly looking to make it easier for you to move more enterprise workloads into the cloud and run them without any changes. Prior to today, the virtual machine (VM) availability SLA required at least two instances, which presented challenges for some existing on-premises workloads that could not scale-out or where scale and management were expensive and cumbersome. I am excited to announce that, starting today, Azure now offers an SLA availability commitment on single instance VMs.
• We are also announcing the availability of several Microsoft Hybrid Use Benefit (HUB) Azure gallery images, making it much easier to take advantage of this benefit. It builds on our announcement a few months ago offering the support for Microsoft Azure Hybrid Use Benefit (AHUB) where customers can use on-premises Windows Server licenses that include Software Assurance to run Windows Server virtual machines on Azure with significant cost savings.

SAP HANA Large Instances

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of purpose-built infrastructure for running SAP HANA applications in Azure. These instances (called SAP HANA Large Instances) can power the largest SAP HANA workloads of any hyperscale public cloud provider. Today, we’re excited to announce two new instance types – a 2TB RAM and a 4 TB RAM type and the first Azure size based on the new Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 v4 family (codename Broadwell) – providing more choice to customers for their SAP HANA workloads, including certified NetWeaver SAP environments.

Here are the details on the additional two new SKUs:

Learn more about the Large Instance SKUs.

SAP HANA Large Instances offer an availability SLA of 99.99% for an HA pair, the highest among all hyperscale public cloud vendors. These instances provide built-in infrastructure support for backup and restore, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios. Additionally, these instances have integrated support with partners, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP, so you can confidently bring your production workloads to Azure with HA, DR, and great performance.

Single Instance SLA

Over the last few months, we have done extensive work to improve availability of the Azure infrastructure, including innovative machine-learning to predict failing hardware early and offering premium storage to help improve reliability and performance of attached disks. Today, we are announcing a new 99.9% single-instance availability SLA to better support applications that cannot easily scale beyond single VMs. We hope this enables you to move even more workloads into Azure and take advantage of the agility of the cloud without compromising on your expectations of availability.

To qualify for the single instance virtual machine SLA, all storage disks attached to the VM must be using premium storage, which offers this high level of availability and performance with up to 80,000 IOPS and 2,000 MBps of disk throughput. In addition to this new availability commitment, customers can continue to build for multi-machine high availability by having two or more VMs deployed in the same Availability Set or by utilizing VM Scale Sets which both provide machine isolation, network isolation, and power unit isolation across multiple virtual machines.

For more information about our SLA for Virtual Machines, please visit our SLA page. For additional information on premium storage and how to get started on migrating your workloads, visit the product page.

Hybrid Use Benefit Images

With the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit, you can deploy your Windows Server licenses that include Software Assurance at a large discount, up to 44% in annual savings. Starting today, instead of requiring you to upload those images, you can now deploy pre-built HUB Windows Server images that you can access straight from Azure Marketplace (search for “[HUB] Windows Server”) or deploy them using your favorite client tools such as the new Azure CLI or the Azure PowerShell. You can also use these Microsoft-certified HUB images to leverage the rich automation features in the portal with Azure QuickStart GitHub templates (i.e. storage configuration, Automated Backup and automated Patching, etc.). This provides flexibility, convenience, and big cost savings.

Learn more about the Hybrid Use Benefit on our documentation page.

With these announcements, you can deploy even more applications and solutions into Azure with ease, speed, and low cost. I hope you find these new capabilities valuable and will take advantage of them when deploying on Azure. I am looking forward to hearing about your experiences.

– Corey