Amazon wants to run your high-performance databases

The company’s new R3 instances have up to 262GB of RAM

By Mikael Ricknäs | IDG News Service

Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services is making a pitch for enterprises’ high-performance databases to run on its infrastructure, launching new instances optimized for the task.

The R3 instance family has been added to Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), which takes care of the administrative grunt work for databases such as MySQL and SQL Server.

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The new instances are optimized for memory-intensive applications, and have the the lowest cost per GB of RAM among all of Amazon’s RDS instance types. They can be used to run the kinds of demanding database workloads often found in gaming, enterprise, social media, web, and mobile applications, Amazon said in a blog post.

The underlying hardware uses the latest Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and delivers higher sustained memory bandwidth with lower network latency and jitter compared to existing instances.
The five R3 instances have between 16GB and 262GB of RAM plus between two and 32 virtual CPUs. The highest performing instance has a network speed of up to 10Gbps.

Right now, users can launch databases based on version 5.6 of MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server. Support for versions 5.1 and 5.5 of MySQL is in the works, as is support for Oracle’s database, Amazon said.

On-demand pricing for MySQL R3 instances start at US$0.240 per hour in the US West region. They are available from Amazon’s datacenters in Europe, the Asia Pacfic region and the U.S. The company expects to make them available from Beijing, São Paulo and the GovCloud in the near future, as well.

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