GCP – Unlock 66% better price-performance with new M4 VMs for memory-intensive workloads

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the memory-optimized machine series: Compute Engine M4, our most performant memory-optimized VM with under 6TB of memory. 

The M4 family is designed for workloads like SAP HANA, SQL Server, and in-memory analytics that benefit from higher memory-to-core ratio. The M4 is based on Intel’s latest 5th generation Xeon processors (code-named Emerald Rapids), with instances scaling up to 224 vCPUs and 6TB of DDR5 memory. M4 offers two ratios of memory to vCPU, allowing you to choose to upgrade your memory-optimized infrastructure. They are offered in predefined shapes with a 13.3:1 and 26.6:1 memory/core ratio, for instance shapes ranging from 372GB to 6TB, with complete SAP HANA certification in all shapes and sizes.

M4 VMs are also engineered and fine-tuned to deliver consistent performance, with up to 66% better price-performance compared to our previous memory-optimized M3¹. The M4 outperforms the M3 with up to 2.25x² more SAPs, a substantial improvement in overall performance. Additionally, M4 delivers up to 2.44x better price performance compared to the M2³. To support customers’ most business-critical workloads, M4 offers enterprise-grade reliability and granular controls for scheduled maintenance, and is backed by Compute Engine’s Memory Optimized 99.95% Single Instance SLA — important for business-critical in-memory database workloads such as SAP.

“We are excited to announce our collaboration with Google Cloud to bring the power of the 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors to the first memory-optimized (M4) instance type among leading hyperscalers. This launch represents a significant milestone in delivering cutting-edge performance, scalability, and efficiency to cloud users for large-scale databases such as SAP Hana and memory-intensive workloads. The new M4 instance delivers advanced capabilities for today and future workloads, empowering businesses to innovate and grow in the digital era.” – Rakesh Mehrotra, VP & GM DCAI Strategy & Product Management, Intel

A full portfolio of memory–optimized machine instances 

M4 is just the latest in a long line of Compute Engine’s memory-optimized VM family. We introduced the M1 in 2018 for SAP HANA. M2 followed in 2019, supporting larger workloads. In 2023, we introduced M3, with improved performance and new features. X4 launched in 2024, supporting the largest in-memory databases, with up to 32TB of memory, making Google Cloud the first hyperscaler with an SAP-certified instance of that size.

“For years, SAP and Google Cloud have had a powerful partnership, helping businesses transform with RISE with SAP on Google Cloud. Now, fueled by the enhanced performance, high reliability, and cost efficiency of M4 machines, we’re accelerating our mission to deliver even greater value to our shared customers.” – Lalit Patil, CTO for RISE with SAP, Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP SE

Today, both customers and internal Google teams are adopting the M4 to take advantage of increased performance, new shapes, and Compute Engine’s newest innovations.

Powered by Titanium 

M4 is underpinned by Google’s Titanium offload technology, enabling ultra low-latency with up to 200 Gb/s of networking bandwidth. By offloading storage and networking to the Titanium adapter, host resources are preserved for running your workloads. Titanium also provides M4 with enhanced lifecycle management, reliability, and security. With Titanium’s hitless upgrades and live migration capabilities, most infrastructure maintenance can be performed with minimal to no disruption, helping to ensure predictable performance. Additionally, Titanium’s custom-built security hardware root-of-trust further strengthens the security of customer workloads.

Next-level storage with Hyperdisk

M4 VMs come with the latest Hyperdisk storage technology, now available in both Hyperdisk Balanced and Hyperdisk Extreme options. With up to 320K IOPS per instance, Hyperdisk Balanced delivers a blend of performance and cost-efficiency for a wide range of workloads, handling typical transactional throughput and moderate query volumes effectively. Hyperdisk Extreme pushes the boundaries of storage performance, up to 500K IOPS and up to 10,000 MiB/s of throughput per M4 instance for the most demanding applications such as SAP HANA’s in-memory database operations, which require low-latency access to large datasets. You can attach up to 64 Hyperdisk volumes per M4 VM, with up to 512 TiB of total capacity, with a mix of Balanced and Extreme volumes.

Hyperdisk’s benefits go beyond raw performance. It allows you to dynamically tune IOPS and bandwidth in real time, so your workloads consistently have the resources they need. Hyperdisk storage pools, available for Hyperdisk Balanced volumes, support capacity pooling and flexible allocation of storage resources, optimizing both utilization and cost-efficiency. As a result, Hyperdisk delivers not only high performance and flexibility but also a significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to traditional storage solutions. The combination of Hyperdisk’s advanced features and Titanium’s storage acceleration offloads storage processing from the CPU, frees up compute resources, and enhances overall M4 performance.

SAP certifications

Building on existing SAP certifications on Google Cloud—including X4 for SAP ASE and C4 for SAP Adaptive Server – M4 machines are certified for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver-based Application workloads. For transactional and analytical applications deployed on the SAP HANA database, please reference the certified and supported SAP HANA Hardware directory. 

For SAP applications, including SAP NetWeaver-based applications deployed on non-SAP HANA databases (SAP ASE, DB2, SQL Server), such as SAP Business Suite and SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SAP certifications are available for the following machine shapes: 372GB, 744GB, 1,488GB, 2,976GB and 5,952GB. You can find more information on supported SAP applications in SAP Note 2456432.

Get started today

Whether you’re running advanced analytics, complex algorithms, or real-time insights for critical workloads on databases like SAP HANA and SQL Server in the cloud, M4 VMs provide the performance, features, and stability to meet your business needs. With high-performance infrastructure designed to handle massive datasets, M4 VMs offer robust memory and compute capabilities that can meet the needs of your most demanding workloads. 

M4 instances are currently available in us-east4, europe-west4, europe-west3, us-central1 and will be coming to additional regions. Like other instances of the M machine family, you can purchase them on-demand or committed use discounts (CUDs). For more, see the M4’s predefined compute resource pricing or start using M4 in your next project today.

<sub>1. M3-megamem-64 compared to M4-megamem-56. Performance based on the estimated SPECrate®2017_int_base performance benchmark score
2. M4-megamem-224 comparing to M3-megamem-128
3. M4-ultramem-224 comparing to M2-ultramem-208</sub>