AWS News Blog
EC2 Update – D3 / D3en Dense Storage Instances
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We have launched several generations of EC2 instances with dense storage including the HS1 in 2012 and the D2 in 2015. As you can guess from the name, our customers use these instances when they need massive amounts of very economical on-instance storage for their data warehouses, data lakes, network file systems, Hadoop clusters, and the like. These workloads demand plenty of I/O and network throughput, but work fine with a high ratio of storage to compute power.
New D3 and D3en Instances
Today we are launching the D3 and D3en instances. Like their predecessors, they give you access to massive amounts of low-cost on-instance HDD storage. The D3 instances are available in four sizes, with up to 32 vCPUs and 48 TB of storage. Here are the specs:
| Instance Name | vCPUs | RAM | HDD Storage | Aggregate Disk Throughput (128 KiB Blocks) |
Network Bandwidth | EBS-Optimized Bandwidth |
| d3.xlarge | 4 | 32 GiB | 6 TB (3 x 2 TB) | 580 MiBps | Up to 15 Gbps | 850 Mbps |
| d3.2xlarge | 8 | 64 GiB | 12 TB (6 x 2 TB) | 1,100 MiBps | Up to 15 Gbps | 1,700 Mbps |
| d3.4xlarge | 16 | 128 GiB | 24 TB (12 x 2 TB) | 2,300 MiBps | Up to 15 Gbps | 2,800 Mbps |
| d3.8xlarge | 32 | 256 GiB | 48 TB (24 x 2 TB) | 4,600 MiBps | 25 Gbps | 5,000 Mbps |
As you can see from the table above, the D3 instances are available in the same configurations as the D2 instances for easy migration. You’ll get 5% more memory per vCPU, a 30% boost in compute power, and 2.5x higher network performance if you migrate from D2 to D3. The instances provide low-cost dense storage that delivers high performance sequential access to large data sets. They are perfect for distributed file systems such as HDFS and MapR FS, big data analytical workloads, data warehouses, log processing, and data processing.
The D3en instances are available in six sizes, with up to 48 vCPUs and 336 TB of storage. Here are the specs:
| Instance Name | vCPUs | RAM | HDD Storage | Aggregate Disk Throughput (128 KiB Blocks) |
Network Bandwidth | EBS-Optimized Bandwidth |
| d3en.xlarge | 4 | 16 GiB | 28 TB (2 x 14 TB) | 500 MiBps | Up to 25 Gbps | 850 Mbps |
| d3en.2xlarge | 8 | 32 GiB | 56 TB (4 x 14 TB) | 1,000 MiBps | Up to 25 Gbps | 1,700 Mbps |
| d3en.4xlarge | 16 | 64 GiB | 112 TB (8 x 14 TB) | 2,000 MiBps | 25 Gbps | 2,800 Mbps |
| d3en.6xlarge | 24 | 96 GiB | 168 TB (12 x 14 TB) | 3,100 MiBps | 40 Gbps | 4,000 Mbps |
| d3en.8xlarge | 32 | 128 GiB | 224 TB (16 x 14 TB) | 4,100 MiBps | 50 Gbps | 5,000 Mbps |
| d3en.12xlarge | 48 | 192 GiB | 336 TB (24 x 14 TB) | 6,200 MiBps | 75 Gbps | 7,000 Mbps |
The D3en instances have a high ratio of storage to vCPU, and are optimized for high throughput and high sequential I/O to very large data sets, with a cost-per-TB that is 80% lower than on D2 instances. D3en instances can host Lustre, BeeGFS, GPFS, and other distributed file systems, they can store your data lakes, and they can run your Amazon EMR, Spark, and Hadoop analytical workloads.
Both of the instance types are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by custom Intel® Second Generation Scalable Xeon® (Cascade Lake) processors that can deliver all-core turbo performance of up to 3.1 GHz. The HDD storage is encrypted at rest using AES-256-XTS; traffic between D3 or D3en instances in the same VPC or within peered VPCs is encrypted using a 256-bit key.
Things to Know
Here are a couple of things that you should keep in mind regarding the D3 and D3en instances:
Regions – D3en instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions; D3 instances are available in all of those regions and also in the US East (Ohio) Region, with more regions coming soon.
Purchase Options – You can purchase D3 and D3 instances in On-Demand, Savings Plan, Reserved Instance, Spot, and Dedicated Instance form.
AMIs – You must use AMIs that include the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe drivers.
Now Available
D3 and D3en instances are available now and you can start using them today!
— Jeff;