Amazon Web Service has fielded what it calls High Storage instances, a new EC2 instance family for applications requiring fast access to large amounts of data.
These new 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, 117GiB (gibibytes) of RAM and 48TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives.
The widgetry is capable of delivering more than 2.4GB a second of sequential I/O performance.
With large amounts of direct-attached storage per instance, these High Storage instances are good for data-intensive apps like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems to process and analyze large data sets in the AWS cloud.