Just caveats. This doesn't look like a terribly interesting option.
Of course, getting that much data into and out of the cloud is its own problem.
I'm having a tough time seeing where this type of instance fits.
Not sure what you mean... there are quite a few data storage & processing tools out there that use a log-structured on-disk storage that were designed to read/write sequentially. These could potentially take full advantage of these instances.
Many other solution requiring random IO is indeed a fact, but I still think there are systems that could benefit.
The corporate-ir site is actually part of Thomson Reuters and our press releases end up there.
If a particular AWS release includes both a press release and a blog post, the press release goes out first.
After the release shows up in public I publish the blog post and submit it to HN.
Quantum fluctuations of the universe caused the press release to get more votes than the blog post and that's why it's on the front page.
I just ran some 'Reserved Instances' quotes and for 12 months I got $3968.00 upfront and then $2.24 per hour OR $9200.00 upfront and then $1.38 per hour. For 3 years you can go as far as $16924.00 upfront and then $0.76 per hour (for a long term effective rate of $1.404/hr).
Well, depends on what you compare to.
The reserved price for 3 years is quite revealing in this case; So Amazon asks $16924 upfront and... wait, $17k upfront?
You can buy an equivalent supermicro box with 24x2T, 192G Ram (not 128) for $10k. Thus if you rent the reserved EC2 variant for 3 years you end up paying at least a 4x markup versus housing a dedicated box.
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-...
" The High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances are a great fit for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 117 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.
This instance family is designed for data-intensive applications that require high storage density and high sequential I/O -- data warehousing, log processing, and seismic analysis (to name a few). We know that these applications can generate or consume tremendous amounts of data and that you want to be able to run them on EC2. The storage on this instance family is local, and has a lifetime equal to that of the instance. You should think of these instances as building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system. You should build a degree of redundancy into your storage architecture (e.g. RAID 1, 5, or 6) and you should use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Of course, you should also back up your data to Amazon S3 for increased durability. "
