AWS launches 2TB RAM super-machine

Amazon Web Services has announced a new super-charged server instance named X1 that includes up to 2TB of memory and four Intel Xeon E7 processors.

"This is the first use of the E7 in an infrastructure-as-a-service platform," Intel data centre general manager Diane Bryant said at the AWS re:Invent conference.

According to AWS, the enormous amount of RAM in the X1 is designed for running in-memory databases such as SAP Hana, processing real-time analytics, creating giant graphics or maintaining large caches.

The Xeon E7 processors have "high memory bandwidth and large L3 caches" that support such applications.

"With over 100 vCPUs, these instances will be able to handle highly concurrent workloads with ease," stated AWS on its blog.

Chief technology officer of Australian AWS partner Bulletproof, John Ferlito, approved of the debut of the high-end instance: "The X1 will have future use as more and more demanding solutions come into play in Australia".

The X1 will be available in the first half of 2016.

At the other end of the scale, AWS chief technology officer Werner Vogels unveiled a new instance called T2.Nano that has just 512MB of RAM. The cloud vendor is pushing the product as ideal for small websites with "modest" amounts of traffic or to run monitoring tools.

"The T2 instances provide a baseline level of processing power, along with the ability to save up unused cycles ('CPU Credits') and use them when the need arises," said AWS on its blog. "We launched the t2.micro, t2.small, and t2.medium a little over a year ago…[But] It turns out that most of them never actually consume all of their CPU Credits and are able to run at full core performance."

The T2.Nano will be available "later this year".

The journalist travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of Amazon Web Services.