High Storage Instances Available From Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services, Inc., or AWS, provider of infrastructure web services in the cloud, announced the availability of High Storage Instances, a new Amazon EC2 instance type optimized for applications requiring fast access to large amounts of data.

Customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets can take advantage of the capabilities of this new Amazon EC2 instance type.

High Storage instances are especially well suited for customers who use Hadoop, data warehouses, and parallel file systems to process and analyze large data sets in the AWS cloud.

High Storage instances are currently available as a single instance type, Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) and provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117GB of RAM, and 48TB of storage across 24 HDDs. hs1.8xlarge instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4GB/s of sequential I/O performance.

High Storage Eight Extra Large instances can be purchased as On Demand or Reserved Instances in the US East (N. Virginia) region. Support for additional regions will be added in the coming months.

On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs.

The pricing below includes the cost to run private and public AMIs on the specified operating system (‘Windows Usage’ prices apply to Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012). Amazon also provides with additional instances for Amazon EC2 running Windows with SQL Server, Amazon EC2 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 running IBM that are priced differently.

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour.