[AWS/EC2]Tokyo Region:Result Report for SAP Performance

Japanese version is here.

Have you checked out an announcement at SAPPHIRE 2011 (May 18, 2011)? 

SAP certified that SAP solutions run in production environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 
Presently, some particular SAP solutions are only supported on AWS. On the other hand, the information is quite huge and you can get a bunch of knowledge for SAP with cloud computing. So we pick up interesting topics on our blog. Today we are telling you about SAP System “Performance” on AWS. 

We’ve tried to find proven information to show us how SAP powerfully running on AWS, but there is no such visible data to evaluate its speed and quality.  Then we intended to do the first trial for SAP/AWS Performance check using the SD Benchmark tool. In this case, our goal was not getting the highest speed record.  We prepared a common system with default settings.

- Our Test Environment
A physical computer is located in Tokyo running the SD Benchmark and SAP Client, connects to the SAP Server on AWS Tokyo Data Center. 

 -System Information for SAP Server on the AWS
To check via our local computer, the processor speed indicates 2.27GHz ~ 3.42 GHz. It’s not fixed.

 -Amazon Instance
   -Large Instance (Tokyo Data Center):
    *for the details, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
                  7.5 GB memory
                  4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
                  850 GB instance storage
   -OS:        Windows Server 2008 R2
   -RDBMS:  MS SQL SERVER 2008 R2
   -SAP:       SAP ERP 6.0 EhP4
        Number of work process: 10 DIA / 3 BGD

 -Test Result

 -Number of SD benchmark Users: 150
  Average CPU utilization: 95 %
  Average dialog response time: 1.1 seconds
  circumstance: No error happens. <----------------- GOOD!

 -Number of SD benchmark Users: 155
  Average CPU utilization: 100 %
  circumstance: Half of users get errors. <---------- Not Good!

 -Number of SD benchmark Users: 160
  Average CPU utilization: 100 %
  circumstance: All of users get errors. <----------- Bad!

According to SAP Note #1588667 “SAP on Amazon Web Services”, SAP supports 3700 SAPS for the High-memory Double Extra Large Instance with 13.0 Elastic Compute Unites. On this test environment, it could be supported 1138 SAPS [3700 SAPS x 4.0 ECU / 13.0 ECU].

From the result above, we assume that the AWS Large Instance supports 750 SAPS [estimated with 5 SAPS per user x 150 users]. It means the performance on our test gets 66% [750 SAPS / 1138 SAPS] of the SAP Note. Consequently, we figure out that SAP system on AWS is running well for the small/mid-sized business. 
 
We say “AWS Tokyo is awesome” !!!
Oh, well… This is not SAP official report, our own view. Please make it off the record.

Anyway, do you know what SD Benchmark Tool is? Have you ever tested SAP performance with it? We don’t think that so many people use SD Benchmark Tool which is available for SAP Partner only. We can show you the screenshot of it below. To be honest, we always struggle to handle it, because this is NOT a user-friendly with various operations under the different SP levels.

 
Amazon is jumping into SAP world. Welcome to our specialty area. For the next topic, we are going to check its cost effectiveness perspective. Looking forward to your comments!