Amazon Brings More Power to Cloud Server Instances at AWS Summit

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a series of new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual server instance types at its AWS Summit New York on July 17.

Among the new EC2 instance types are the Z1d high frequency instance, R5 for memory optimization and R5d for memory optimized with local storage. Additionally, AWS announced EC2 instances are now available to run on the company’s Snowball Edge devices.

The Z1d EC2 instances provide CPU power with clock speeds of up to 4.0 GHz. AWS is using custom-designed Intel Xeon Scalable Processors to enable the Z1d instances, which provide an all-core Turbo Boost option for sustained high-clock speed performance.

There are six different sizes for the Z1d, with the entry level called the z1d.large system, which provides 2 virtual CPUs (vCPUs), 16 GB of memory, 75 GB of NVMe SSD storage and up to 10 Gbps of network bandwidth. At the top end, the z1d.12xlarge provides 48 vCPUs, 384 GB of RAM, 1.8 TB of NVMe SSD storage and 25 Gbps of network bandwidth.

R5

The R5 instances are all about memory, and are powered by customized Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors running at up to 3.1 GHz.

The entry-level R5 instance has 2 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM. The top-end R5 instance offers a staggering amount of power, with 96 vCPUs and 768 GB of memory.

Snowball Edge

EC2 instances have long had a limitation in that they can only run in AWS. Now, however, AWS is enabling EC2 instance to also run on the company’s AWS Snowball Edge devices

“These ruggedized devices, with 100 TB of local storage, can be used to collect and process data in hostile environments with limited or non-existent Internet connections before shipping the processed data back to AWS for storage, aggregation, and detailed analysis,” Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS, wrote in a blog post.

“Each Snowball Edge device is powered by an Intel Xeon D processor running at 1.8 GHz, and supports any combination of instances that consume up to 24 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory,” Barr continued.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.