Amazon Web Services Introducing High Memory Cluster Instances

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced High Memory Cluster instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family designed for memory-intensive applications such as in-memory analytics, databases, caching, and scientific computing.

High Memory Cluster instances are for applications that require a large amount of memory on a single instance, or require taking advantage of distributed memory architectures. For distributed memory-intensive applications, they are a cost-effective Amazon EC2 instance and provide a lower cost per GB of memory than other instances.

These instances are based on two Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors which provide 88 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, two 120GB SSDs of instance storage, high bandwidth networking, and 244GB of RAM. This provides customers with improved performance and efficiency for in-memory analytics and other memory-intensive applications.
 
"Memory-intensive workloads such as real-time applications used by healthcare providers, social networking companies and advertising technology providers require large amounts of memory to maintain high-performance," said Peter DeSantis, VP of compute services, AWS. "We designed the High Memory Cluster instances specifically for these workloads, and this is the third instance family (along with High Storage instances and High I/O instances) launched in the past six months designed specifically for high performance applications. We’ll continue to listen and learn from customers and provide additional instance families and capabilities to meet the requirements of their applications."
 
"The new High Memory Cluster instances provide sizeable CPU cores and storage to run even larger workloads on SAP HANA in the AWS cloud," said Sapan Panigrahi, VP, HANA Cloud, SAP AG. "By leveraging the strength of SAP HANA in-memory computing, with the agility and low cost of the AWS cloud, a new generation of solutions are now possible. We look forward to enabling these instances to help our customers run real-time applications in the cloud."
 
"Engine Yard enables thousands of developers and organizations to write powerful applications for business analytics, advertising and social media analysis and deploy in the cloud," said Bill Platt, SVP operations at Engine Yard, Inc. "The high memory capacity, combined with the high computing and networking capabilities of the High Memory Cluster instances, will greatly benefit customers doing in-memory analytics and running transactional applications on our platform."
 
Customers can launch Linux and Windows High Memory Cluster instances using the AWS Management Console, the AWS and Amazon EC2 Command Line Interfaces, AWS SDKs, and third party libraries.

High Memory Cluster instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia) region and will be made available in other AWS Regions in the coming months.

Customers can purchase these new instances as On-Demand, Reserved or Spot instances.