Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud High Storage Instance Family

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced High Storage instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family optimized for applications requiring fast access to large amounts of data.

These new instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117GB of RAM, 48TB of storage across 24 HDDs, and are capable of delivering more than 2.4GB/s of sequential I/O performance.

With large amounts of DAS per instance, these High Storage instances are for data-intensive applications including Hadoop workloads, log processing and data warehousing, and parallel file systems to process and analyze large data sets in the AWS Cloud.

"As customers move every imaginable workload to AWS, we continue to provide them with additional instance families to meet the requirements of their applications," said Peter De Santis, VP of Amazon EC2. "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 be very important for customers using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to process large quantities of data."

"We’re very excited about the introduction of High Storage instances. These instances significantly lower the cost of processing large data sets with Elastic MapReduce," said John Schroeder, CEO of MapR Technologies, Inc. "MapR’s M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions offer enterprise-grade Hadoop features such as high availability, data snapshotting, mirroring across availability zones, and NFS mounts. High Storage instances are ideal for these distributions, available through Amazon Elastic MapReduce, as they provide customers a low-cost way to quickly and easily process their large data sets."

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.