Amazon rounds out EC2 lineup with top-of-the-line High Storage instances

Catering to applications that need to query huge stores of data very quickly, Amazon announced High Storage instances for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud application platform on Friday. They fall in line with Amazon's High CPU, High Memory, and High I/O instances.

These instances offer users 35 ECUs (also known as an EC2 Compute Unit, the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor), 117 Gibibytes of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage spread out across 24 HDDs. With 10 Gigabit Ethernet, these instances can offer 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O.

Amazon says these instances are good for uses like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing, cluster file systems, seismic analysis, and so forth.

These instances are now the most expensive of EC2's on-demand compute resources with eight costing $4.600 per hour in Linux/Unix and $4.931 per hour in Windows. It should also be noted that these High Storage Instances are only supported with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 AMI for Cluster Instances, and Windows Server 2012 AMIs.

Photo Credit:  Novelo/Shutterstock