Amazon Web Services has added a new storage instance for data intensive applications. The new instances are designed for applications that require high storage depth and I/O performance.

According to the AWS blog, the “High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances includes 120 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.”

The new storage instances are applicable to data warehouse applications, log processing and specific applications for vertical markets such as retail and oil and gas exploration.

AWS says on the blog that customers should think of developing a complete storage system when considering these types of instances. They should build in redundancy into their storage architecture and use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Data back up is critical.

So why offer this high storage instance? The news is reminiscent of what AWS announced at re:Invent. In particular, Redshift, the new data warehouse service AWS is offering.

AWS is using it infrastructure to once again offer services that the large enterprise companies offer. Teradata, for example, offers data warehouse applications as does Oracle and IBM. But their solutions are very expensive due to the high margins these enterprise giants have historically commanded.

AWS is turning that model on it head by offering high-performance services that they can offer to customers at far lower prices. The trick will be if they can get the volume required to make such a low margin business successful.

AWS also announced that the Data Pipeline service it announced at AWS re:Invent is now available. You can read how to implement it also on the AWS blog.

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