AWS Unveils H1 Storage Optimized, I3 Bare Metal and M5 EC2 Instances

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced a Bare Metal instance offering for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and introduced a Storage Optimized instance family (H1 instances).

The H1 Storage Optimized instances are designed for data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce, distributed file systems, network file systems, log or data processing, and big data clusters. The company also launched the next generation of General Purpose instances, M5, which have up to 50% more vCPUs, 50% more memory, and 25% more network bandwidth than previous generation M4 instances. To get started with the Amazon EC2 instances.

“AWS continues to expand and enhance what was already the cloud’s broadest and most capable compute service,” said Matt Garman, VP, AWS compute services, AWS. “Most of our customers have diverse computing needs, and they’ve told us having the right instance for the right workload really matters. Today, we expand the options we give customers across three dimensions, introducing a brand new capability with Bare Metal instances for the I3 High I/O family, launching a new family of Storage Optimized instances designed for big data workloads with H1, and providing higher performance and lower prices for general purpose workloads with the launch of M5.“

Available in preview, EC2 I3 Bare Metal instances are the first AWS instances to allow customer applications to run directly on the underlying hardware while still providing access to all the elasticity, scalability, and security of the cloud. Designed for workloads that are not virtualized, require specific types of hypervisors, or have licensing models that restrict virtualization, EC2 I3 Bare Metal instances give applications direct access to Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors, 512GB of memory, 36 hyperthreaded cores, and 15.2TB of local, SSD-based NVME storage. I3 Bare Metal instances are not simply repackaged bare metal servers-they provide all of the flexibility and capability customers have come to expect from EC2 instances, including support for attaching Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, the ability to use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and security group settings, and the ability to use Elastic IP addresses or Elastic Load Balancers. Bare Metal instances are built on top of the firm’s Nitro system, which includes AWS-engineered hardware that enables performance and HA through hardware offload cards, as well secure protection of the hardware and system software with a custom AWS Nitro security processor that is built directly onto the motherboard. As with all EC2 instances, customers can deploy applications to Bare Metal instances in minutes, and scale these applications up and down ins.

“VMware and AWS have jointly engineered VMware Cloud on AWS, an on-demand vSphere-based service, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized to run on Amazon EC2 Bare Metal instances,” said Mark Lohmeyer, VP and GM, cloud platform business unit, VMware, Inc. “We are delivering a seamless hybrid cloud to enable our mutual customers to run their business-critical applications in a trusted VMware environment, while taking advantage of high-performance access to AWS services. Whether our mutual customers need on-demand capacity, want to migrate their applications to cloud, or use cloud for DR, Amazon EC2 Bare Metal instances have made it possible for us to offer an operationally consistent VMware environment both on premises and in AWS.”

Available, H1 instances are a new family of EC2 Storage Optimized instances designed for big data and data-intensive workloads, including MapReduce, distributed file systems like HDFS and MapR-FS, network file systems, log or data processing applications like Apache Kafka, and big data clusters.

Powered by 2.3GHz Xeon E5 2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors, H1 instances provide up to 64 vCPUs and 256GB of DRAM. With up to 16TB of magnetic storage and enhanced networking that provides 25Gb/s of network bandwidth per instance, they are for processing very large data sets. Compared to existing D2 (dense storage) instances, theys provide more compute and memory per terabyte of magnetic disk, along with increased network bandwidth. This provides a balance of resources that reduces costs for big data uses cases that require more processing power.

Available, M5 instances are the next generation of EC2 General Purpose instances, powered by 2.5GHz Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processors. With Enhanced Networking, and a larger instance size that provides up to 96 vCPUs and 384GB of memory, M5 instances have up to 50% more vCPUs, 50% more memory, and 25% more network bandwidth than M4, making them for web and application servers, backend enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, and application development environments.