US-based Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has announced High Storage instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family optimised for applications requiring fast access to large amounts of data. These new instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives, and are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB per second of sequential I/O performance.
With large amounts of direct attached storage per instance, the High Storage instances are reportedly ideal for data-intensive applications. These include Hadoop workloads, log processing and data warehousing, and parallel file systems to process and analyse large data sets in the AWS Cloud.
High Storage instances are the 9th Amazon EC2 instance family and join Cluster Compute instances and High I/O instances as instance families designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of customers' most demanding applications. These new instances also power Amazon Redshift, a new petabyte scale data warehousing service, and will reportedly be very important for customers using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to process large quantities of data.
Customers can launch High Storage instances using the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interface, AWS SDKs, and third party libraries. High Storage instances are currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) region and will be made available in other AWS regions in the coming months. Customers can purchase High Storage instances as On-Demand or Reserved instances.
