AWS: Availability of Storage Optimized Amazon EC2 I7ie Instances

By Jeff Barr, chief evangelist, AWS

The storage optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I7ie instances feature up to 120TB of low latency NVMe storage and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.2GHz. Fueled by 3rd Gen AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver the highest storage density available in the cloud today.

When compared to previous-gen of storage optimized instances, they provide:

Up to 65% better real-time storage performance/TB
Up to 50% lower I/O latency with up to 65% lower latency variability
Up to 40% better compute performance
Up to twice as many vCPUs and twice as much memory
20% better price-performance

The instances are designed to support I/O intensive workloads that need a high degree of random IO/s: NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, search engines, data warehouses, and analytics.

I7ie instances are available in 9 sizes with up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5TB of memory:

Instance Name	vCPUs	Memory	NVMe Storage (Nitro SSD)	EBS Bandwidth	Network Bandwidth
I7ie.large	2	16GB	1.25TB (1 x 1.25TB)	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.xlarge	4	32GB	2.5TB (1 x 2.5TB)	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.2xlarge	8	64GB	5TB (2 x 2.5TB)	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.3xlarge	12	96GB	7.5TB (3 x 2.5TB)	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.6xlarge	24	192GB	15TB (2 x 7.5TB)	Up to 10 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.12xlarge	48	384GB	30TB (4 x 7.5TB)	15 Gbps	Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.18xlarge	72	576GB	45TB (6 x 7.5TB)	22.5 Gbps	Up to 75 Gbps
I7ie.24xlarge	96	768GB	60TB (8 x 7.5TB)	30 Gbps	Up to 100 Gbps
I7ie.48xlarge	192	1,536GB	120TB (16 x 7.5TB)	60 Gbps	100 Gbps

A larger L3 cache, increased memory bandwidth, and other improvements deliver increased processing power. The VP2INTERSECT instruction (part of AVX-512) accelerates ML and graph processing workloads; the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) increase DL training and inferencing performance.

On the network side, the instances feature over 3x the EBS bandwidth of the previous-gen of storage optimized instances. This accelerates just about every I/O-intensive use case, and is especially helpful when hydrating an in-memory database or caching server. All instances sizes support the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and can be launched in cluster placement groups; the 48xlarge instance size also supports the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).

Things to know
Here are a couple of things that you should know about these new instances:

Regions – We are launching in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, London) AWS Regions today, with plans to expand to others in the future.
Purchase Options – I7ie instances are available in On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plan, Dedicated Instance, and Dedicated Host form.

Resource:
EC2 I7ie instances page