AWS adds new D2 instances for intense data workloads
Amazon is rolling out some new cloud storage instances for corporate customers looking to run data-intensive workloads on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
More specifically, the new D2 instances were built for processing multi-terabyte data sets on Amazon's constantly-scaling Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr described the new instances in a blog post on Tuesday as "building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system."
Running on Intel Xeon (a.k.a. Haswell) processors and Turbo technology, AWS is touting four instance sizes with a base clock frequency at 2.4 GHz and starting price tag of $0.690 for six terabytes of storage.
The largest D2 instance option promises up to 48 terabytes of storage, capable of running up to 3,500 MB/second read and 3,100 MB/second write rates when launched with the most recent version of the Amazon Linux AMI image, according to Barr.
The new D2 instances are ready for deployment starting today across Amazon's US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) availability regions as On-Demand, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances.
This week's debut follows up some new C4 instances designed for processor-intensive applications, which rolled out in January.
AWS also finally pushed out its larger and faster Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes two weeks ago, first promised at the re:Invent 2014 developer conference last November.
Amazon will likely have more cloud news on the way soon with its annual customer summit in San Francisco next week.