Compute Engine C3 bare-metal and X4
The only cloud-based instance certified by SAP HANA Standard Sizing is the X4 32TB system type.
When transferring to a public cloud, enterprise workloads pose particular difficulties. Technology executives prioritize moving these business-critical workloads to the cloud, whether it’s a 32TB in-memory database, a private cloud based on a commercial hypervisor, or an application that can’t function in a virtual machine.
Google Cloud was announced that Compute Engine‘s X4 and C3 bare-metal machine types are now widely accessible, which will facilitate and speed up the migration of these workloads. Within the general-purpose and memory-optimized families, some machine types cater to particular computing requirements:
- Three new instance types have been added to the X4 instance series to handle extra-large in-memory databases like SAP HANA.
- Applications requiring direct access to CPU and memory resources, including commercial and custom hypervisors, are served by three new C3 bare-metal forms.
Titanium, Google Cloud’s system of specially designed custom silicon and several tiers of scale-out offloads, serves as the foundation for X4 and C3. Titanium improves performance, dependability, and security for a range of applications by freeing up the CPU. In actuality, all third-generation and later compute engine machine types are built on titanium.
GA: X4 is now available for extremely high memory-intensive applications
With up to 1,920 vCPUs and 32TB of DDR5 memory, X4’s 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors provide compute and block storage performance that leads the industry. X4 instances come in three configurations and are perfect for extremely large, memory-intensive workloads including relational and graph in-memory databases.
Machine Type | Cores (Hyper threaded) | Memory (GB) | Storage | Standard Networking |
x4-megamem-960-metal | 960 | 16,384 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps |
x4-megamem-1440-metal | 1440 | 24,576 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps |
x4-megamem-1920-metal | 1920 | 32,768 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps |
Unwavering availability and performance across all memory sizes
Database administrators and architects must be able to increase their workloads without compromising performance as an application’s in-memory database expands. For all three of its instance forms, X4 provides a memory/core ratio of 17:1, ensuring that performance increases with size. Actually, out of all the hyperscalers for Intel servers, X4 has the best SAPS benchmark certification results. Because of the architecture of this instance form, X4 is the only hyperscaler instance approved by SAP for 32TB and 24TB OLTP and OLAP with SAP “Standard Sizing.” No other cloud providers have these certifications.
With support for Hyperdisk Extreme, X4 can handle 400K IOPS and 10,000 MBps of throughput. This block storage performance meets recovery time objectives (RTOs) for databases up to 32TB by enabling sub-one-hour memory replenishment time in the unfortunate case of a node failure or restart. Compute Engine‘s memory-optimized 99.95% single-instance SLA also supports X4.
A maintenance experience designed for tasks that are essential to company operations
Google Cloud spoke with enterprise clients to find out what is required to run their business-critical workloads in the cloud when creating the X4 maintenance experience. It returned with three main conclusions:
- Events involving maintenance should be infrequent.
- Clients desire authority over the performance of maintenance.
- Consumers must be informed in advance of impending repair activities.
Using these insights as a guide, Google created the maintenance experience for the X4 instances. For starters, it significantly decreased the number of infrastructure maintenance events it launched by utilizing Titanium offloads. Also, it gives you at least sixty days’ notice when a maintenance event is required, and you are free to initiate it whenever you like during that time.
Compute Engine C3 bare-metal machines types
Customers with workloads that need direct access to the CPU and memory resources of the system, such as container platforms or hypervisors, or that aren’t supported by virtual machines, or who have certain licensing or performance monitoring needs, are best suited for bare-metal machine types.
Customers in the financial services, SaaS/PaaS security, dev/test, and private cloud platform sectors, in particular, frequently require bare-metal machine types in order to achieve their performance objectives.
The 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which run Compute Engine C3 virtual machines (VMs), are the foundation of Compute Engine C3 bare-metal instances. Intel integrated CPU technologies including Intel Quick Assist (QAT), Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), and Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) are only available on Google Cloud instances. They provide many of the same features as the larger C3 virtual machines (VMs), such as the same standard and Tier 1 bandwidth and Hyperdisk storage options. Last but not least, Compute Engine C3 bare-metal instances enjoy the same level of managed maintenance as the other C3 machine family members. There are three settings available for these instances:
Machine Type | Cores (Hyperthreaded) | Memory (GB) | Storage | Standard Networking | Tier 1 Networking |
c3-highcpu-192-metal | 192 | 512 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps | 200Gbps |
c3-standard-192-metal | 192 | 768 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps | 200Gbps |
c3-highmem-192-metal | 192 | 1536 | Hyperdisk | 100Gbps | 200Gbps |
An ongoing emphasis on infrastructure that optimizes workload
With the Titanium offload system at its heart, the Compute Engine architecture has undergone years of development, culminating in the X4 and C3 bare-metal instance types. The X4 and C3 bare-metal machine types are fully integrated, native Compute Engine instances that run on Google Cloud’s server fleet in Google Cloud data centers and can be used like any other Compute Engine virtual machine (VM). This sets them apart from the similarly named Bare Metal Solution, which is restricted to particular workloads or use cases. Future machine families will likely have more bare metal designs as we continue to assist you with modernizing your infrastructure.
Currently, Compute Engine C3 bare-metal machine types are available in the following regions: US-central1, US-east5, US-east1, Europe-west1, and Europe-west4. More regions with C3 virtual machines will follow. They can be purchased on-demand with Flex CUDs or Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), just like other C3 machine family members.