Amazon Web Services Introduces New Amazon EC2 High Storage Instance Family

SEATTLE --(Business Wire)--

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced High Storage instances, a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family optimized for applications requiring fast access to large amounts of data. These new instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM (News - Alert), 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives, and are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB per second of sequential I/O performance. With large amounts of direct attached storage per instance, these High Storage instances are ideal for data-intensive applications including Hadoop workloads, log processing and data warehousing, and parallel file systems to process and analyze large data sets in the AWS Cloud. To get started with Amazon EC2 and High Storage instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.

"As customers move every imaginable workload to AWS, we continue to provide them with additional instance families to meet the requirements of their applications," said Peter De Santis, Vice President of Amazon EC2. "High Storage instances are the 9th Amazon EC2 instance family and join Cluster Compute instances and High I/O instances as instance families designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of customers' most demanding applications. These new instances also power Amazon Redshift, a new petabyte scale data warehousing service, and will be very important for customers using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to process large quantities of data."

"We're very excited about the introduction of High Storage instances. These instances significantly lower the cost of processing large data sets with Elastic MapReduce," said John Schroeder, CEO of MapR Technologies. "MapR's M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions offer enterprise-grade Hadoop features such as high availability, data snapshotting, mirroring across availability zones, and NFS mounts. High Storage instances are ideal for these distributions, available through Amazon Elastic MapReduce, as they provide customers a low-cost way to quickly and easily process their large data sets."

Customers can launch High Storage instances using the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interface, AWS SDKs, and third party libraries. High Storage instances are currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and will be made available in other AWS Regions in the coming months. Customers can purchase High Storage instances as On-Demand or Reserved instances. For more information on Amazon EC2 and High Storage instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing.The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

About Amazon.com (News - Alert)

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the most-advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support, dual-antennas and MIMO for faster streaming and downloads, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine-and it is available in two display sizes-7" and 8.9". The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless, and comes with a groundbreaking $49.99 introductory 4G LTE (News - Alert) data package. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es and www.amazon.com.br. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.