The prospect of infinitely scalable storage and computing power is likely a big data dream come true. Platforms such as Hadoop were designed to accommodate the growing volumes of information in the technology ecosystem today. The trend toward increasingly data-intensive applications is likely to continue as both businesses and consumers generate rapidly escalating volumes of information.
Amazon recently deployed a new cloud storage offering that targets big data deployments. The technology comes in the form of a new Amazon EC2 instance type called High Storage, which is designed specifically for analyzing large quantities of data in Amazon's cloud storage environment.
"High Storage instances are currently available as a single instance type, Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) and provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives," Amazon said, expanding on the technological features.
The High Storage Eight Extra Large instances can currently be purchased in the eastern United States, but the company plans to expand support to other areas over the next few months. Amazon's latest release may signal a larger trend within the cloud storage industry. As IDG News writer Joab Jackson noted, High Storage is the ninth type of instance available through Amazon Web Services.
This suggests a growing need for expanding service portfolios that allow customers to tailor cloud deployments for specific needs. Jackson pointed out that each AWS instance is designed for specific workloads such as utilizing GPUs or completing high performance computing jobs.
