Posted On: Dec 21, 2012

We are excited to announce 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, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives. hs1.8xlarge instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 Gigabytes per second 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. You can learn more about the specifications and capabilities of High Storage instances for Amazon EC2 by visiting the Amazon EC2 instance type page. Detailed pricing information is available at the EC2 pricing page