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Amazon aims new rentable servers at app developers

Amazon Web Services introduces new local SSD-backed servers in effort to lure developers to its cloud storage.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
2 min read
How Amazon Web Services' rentable server program works. Amazon Web Services

In an effort to attract app developers to its cloud storage, Amazon has introduced SSD-backed rentable servers through Amazon Web Services.

Launched Wednesday, the High I/O Quadruple Extra Large EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) includes 2TB of local SSD-backed storage running on eight virtual cores, 60.5GB of RAM, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The new rentable EC2 instances will be an "exceptionally good" host for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB, Amazon Web services said in a blog post.

"Modern web and mobile applications are often highly I/O dependent," Jeff Barr, a senior Amazon Web Services evangelist, wrote in a blog post. "They need to store and retrieve lots of data in order to deliver a rich, personalized experience, and they need to do it as fast as possible in order to respond to clicks and gestures in real time."

Using PV virtualization, AWS said customers could expect 120,000 random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and between 10,000 and 85,000 write IOPS. Using VM and Windows AMIs, customers can expect 90,000 random read IOPS and 9,000 to 75,000 random write IOPS.

The new rentable databases aim to lure more app developers to the cloud, Werner Vogels, the company's chief technology officer, wrote in a blog post today.

"It is my expectation that with the increase of data-centric applications, we will see more and more I/O hungry systems being built that require this type of rock-solid High Performance I/O," Vogels said.

The service is currently available only in North Virginia and Ireland, and can be launched for $3.10 and $3.41, respectively. Of course, once launched, usage fees apply.

Deepak Singh, product manager for EC2, gives more information about the new instance type in the video below: