Amazon Turns Cloud Amps Up to 11 With High I/O

Amazon has rolled out high-performance virtual cloud computing services mated to its speedy new flash-based storage with its new High I/O Instance offering, taking cloud computing up a notch

The hi1.4xlarge has 8 cores and 60.5GB of memory. Most importantly it has 2 SSDs of 1 TB each and a 10 Gb/s Ethernet NIC that using placement groups can be directly connected to other High I/O instances.

The SSDs will give you very high IO performance

The SSDs will give you very high IO performance: for 4k random reads you can get 120,000 IOPS when using PV and 90,000 when using HVM or Windows. Write performance on SSDs is more variable depending on, among other things, the free space the disk, the fragmentation and the type of filesystem. With PV virtualization we are seeing between 10,000 and 85,000 IOPS for 4k random writes and with HVM between 9,000 and 75,000.