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AWS launches bare-metal and NVMe instances for demanding workloads
Amazon Web Services Inc. is continuously working to improve the selection of infrastructure options available on its cloud platform.
The latest additions arrived on Thursday, in the form of a bare-metal offering and a new instance family equipped with high-speed NVMe flash storage. Both target enterprise applications with demanding hardware requirements that can’t be addressed by the more conventional computing options on AWS.
The bare-metal instance, which is now generally available, gives applications direct access to the underlying infrastructure. This is an important requirement for several types of enterprise software.
Legacy workloads, for example, often can’t use regular AWS virtual machines without extensive modifications. The new instance also lends itself to applications that must use bare-metal hardware because of a more specialized operational demand or software licensing constraints.
AWS is currently offering the instance in just one size, the i3.metal. It provides 72 virtual processors running on 36 physical cores, plus 512 gibibytes of memory and network bandwidth of up to 25 gigabits per second.
The other addition to AWS, the NVMe instances, comes with impressive specifications as well. NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express, a communications protocol that makes it possible to move data to and from storage much faster than earlier technologies such as SATA.
The new machines are essentially enhanced versions of the six existing instances in AWS’ C5 series, which is geared toward applications that require a lot of processing power. The NVME-enhanced lineup allows companies to provision between 50 gigabytes and 1.8 terabytes worth of speed flash per node. The storage is physically attached to the C5 servers, which further improves data access speeds by shortening the distance information has to travel.
In the blog post announcing the NVMe machines, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote that the technology will become available for other instance types as well over the coming months.
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