AWS re:Invent 2025 - Accelerating SAP Transformation with Amazon EC2 with the latest Intel Xeon CPUs

Accelerating SAP Transformation with Amazon EC2 and Intel Xeon CPUs

Overview

• This presentation discusses the partnership between AWS, Intel, and SAP to help customers accelerate their SAP workload migration and optimization on the AWS cloud.
• Key focus areas include performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness for running SAP workloads on the latest AWS EC2 instances powered by Intel's latest Xeon processors.
• The session features a case study of Toyota Motor North America's (TMNA) journey in migrating their SAP landscape to AWS and leveraging the latest EC2 instance types.

AWS and Intel's Collaboration

• AWS and Intel have a long-standing partnership dating back to the launch of Amazon EC2 in 2006.
• Over 85% of workloads on AWS EC2 are powered by Intel-based instances.
• The collaboration focuses on delivering:
  1. Performance: Providing the best-in-class compute performance for diverse workloads.
  2. Flexibility: Offering instance types optimized for specific workload requirements.
  3. Cost-Effectiveness: Enabling customers to achieve optimal price-performance benefits.
• The latest 8th generation Intel Xeon-based EC2 instances offer up to 20% performance improvement over previous generations.
• New features like Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) give customers more flexibility to optimize network and storage performance.

Toyota Motor North America's SAP Journey

• TMNA oversees manufacturing, sales, and R&D operations for the North American region, supporting 13 manufacturing plants and corporate functions.
• TMNA runs a blend of on-premises and SaaS-based SAP applications, including SAP ERP, Ariba, and S/4HANA.
• Key challenges faced:
  1. Scalability: Rapid growth in data and compute requirements outpaced on-premises infrastructure.
  2. Performance: CPU contention issues led to production outages and inefficiencies.
  3. Agility: Lengthy hardware procurement and deployment processes.
• TMNA's migration journey to AWS:
  1. 2016-2019: Greenfield SAP implementation and gradual rollout across manufacturing plants.
  2. 2020: Decided to migrate to the cloud due to scalability and agility limitations of on-premises infrastructure.
  3. 2021: Went live with a 12TB production instance on AWS, doubling the initial planned capacity.
  4. 2024: Migrated to the new 24TB U7i instance, which provided double the CPU cores (896) compared to the previous generation.
• Key benefits realized:
  1. Scalability: Ability to rapidly scale compute and memory resources to meet growing demands.
  2. Performance: Significant improvements in critical business processes like month-end close, reducing runtime from 3 days to less than 24 hours.
  3. Agility: Faster deployment of new infrastructure and seamless upgrades, enabling zero-downtime SAP S/4HANA migration.

Future Plans

• TMNA is currently evaluating the new R8i instances, which offer double the SAP SAPS (38,000) compared to the previous generation.
• Expecting a 50% performance improvement and 20% cost reduction by migrating to the R8i instances.

Key Takeaways

• The AWS-Intel-SAP partnership enables customers to accelerate their SAP transformation journey by providing:
  • Purpose-built, high-performance EC2 instances optimized for SAP workloads
  • Seamless scalability and agility to meet growing business demands
  • Significant performance improvements for critical business processes
  • Cost-effective solutions to optimize TCO
• TMNA's case study demonstrates the tangible benefits of this collaboration, including:
  • Overcoming on-premises infrastructure limitations through cloud migration
  • Achieving dramatic performance gains and operational efficiencies
  • Enabling rapid, zero-downtime SAP upgrades and migrations
• Customers can leverage the expertise and resources of AWS, Intel, and SAP to drive their own SAP transformation journeys on the cloud.