Amazon Redshift announces free upgrade for DC1 Reserved Instances to DC2

Posted on: Jul 19, 2018

You can now upgrade your Amazon Redshift DC1 Reserved Instances to DC2 Reserved Instances for the remainder of your DC1 reserved term, and get up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. DC2 nodes are designed for demanding data warehousing workloads that require low latency and high throughput.

In Oct 2017, we announced our next generation DC2 (Dense Compute) nodes. DC2 nodes feature powerful Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) CPUs, fast DDR4 memory, and NVMe-based solid state disks (SSDs). We've tuned Redshift to take advantage of the better CPU, network, and disk on DC2 nodes, to provide up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. In addition, DC2.8xlarge instances now provide twice the memory per slice of data and an optimized storage layout with 30 percent better storage utilization.

To migrate your DC1 cluster to DC2, use the resize or restore operation. If you have a DC1.large cluster, you can restore to a new DC2.large cluster using an existing snapshot. To migrate DC1.8xlarge clusters, you can use the resize operation to move data to your new DC2 cluster. For more information, see Clusters and Nodes in Amazon Redshift

Please make sure to migrate your actual DC1 cluster to DC2 by doing a resize or restore operation before exchanging your DC1 Reserved Instances for DC2. You can then upgrade from DC1 Reserved Instances to DC2 Reserved Instances by going to the 'Reserved Nodes' page on the Amazon Redshift Management Console, or calling the 'AcceptReservedNodeExchange'. For Partial Upfront and No Upfront payment types, the new DC2 Reserved Instances will be billed at the same hourly fee as DC1. For All Upfront payment type, there will be no additional charge. For more information, see our documenation to Upgrade a Reserved Node from DC1 to DC2.

The free upgrade to DC2 reserved nodes is available in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland). EU (London), Asia Pacific (Beijing), Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Asia Pacific (Seoul) Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), China (Ningxia).