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;

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.