Keys to reducing costs and optimising SAP workloads in AWS

More and more organisations using SAP systems are migrating their environments to the cloud and many of them are opting for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market’s leading public cloud platform and the first of its kind to support SAP solutions.

Since 2012, this organisation has not stopped looking for ways to reduce costs and improve both the availability and performance of SAP customers. The latest of its announcements in this regard concentrates a series of new features that we at Syntax, a reference in both environments, consider to have a very positive impact. Keep on reading to know more about all these new features and its advantages.

At Syntax, we are committed to innovation, that’s why we help companies worldwide on the journey to the cloud of their systems, workloads and applications. Get to know more about our projects and solutions. 

Improved SLAs in Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is an ideal tool for hosting SAP file systems, as it is highly scalable and guarantees availability and durability. In addition, it stores data and metadata in various access extensions in an AWS region.

To improve this service, AWS has increased the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to 99.99%, which will certainly be appreciated by those customers who need high availability for their critical SAP workloads.

Updates for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

For users running SAP workloads on Windows, Amazon FSx for Windows Server now allows them to increase the storage capacity and performance of their file systems, very easily, using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

This managed service offers them the flexibility they need, and the ability to size the capacity the company needs at any given time, just by clicking a button. This means that user will not only  experience an increase in flexibility and storage capacity, but the will also be able to scale it according to the required performance.

Higher EBS performance with one-year reservation purchase option

With flexibility and cost savings for users in mind, EC2 memory instances are now available for one-year reservations. This is in addition to the existing three-year availability purchase option. In addition, AWS has improved storage and network bandwidth free of charge for all users.

In terms of storage, each 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 TB instance will be able to have up to 4 times the network bandwidth, while the EC2 High Memory instances will provide 38 Gbps of dedicated storage bandwidth and 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.

What are the benefits for the users with this upgrade? Improved SAP system performance, optimised SAP HANA database load times and S/4 HANA and OLAP extensions, plus longer database backup times.

New Backint agent

Another new development recently announced by the platform and which SAP user companies should be aware of, is a new Backint agent for SAP HANA, which is available free of charge to customers and allows backups of all SAP HANA databases.

And in line with AWS, the new agent follows the pay-per-use model, where users will pay only for the underlying AWS services.

In addition, you should be aware of Syntax CxLink Backup, an approved solution by AWS and certified by SAP, to speed up and optimise the management of database backups on Amazon S3, AWS’s storage service.

Cost reduction at Amazon EC2

AWS has reduced the costs of hosting SAP systems at AWS by up to 18%. The new prices will be reflected in the reserved standard instances and in the savings plans for Amazon EC2 M5, C5 and R5 instances. 

On the other hand, a new model based on AMD EPYC is added to the instances families: Amazon EC2 C5a. These instances have the lowest cost per x86 vCPU within the Amazon EC2 offer and all are developed to run SAP in 2 or 3 tier configurations.

Check out the following link to know more about the virtualized sizes of these instances.

Without doubt, these new features announced a few months ago will help SAP user organisations to get more profitability from their investments in the cloud. At Syntax we design the roadmap that best responds to the business priorities of each company, and we execute it successfully.


If you are looking for a partner for a critical project for your organisation, contact our experts. Or download our free whitepaper to know more ways to optimize your SAP costs on AWS.