Amazon unveils new high-memory instance for EC2

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a "high memory extra-large" instance option for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Amazon's EC2 service provides scalable, cloud-based computing infrastructure on the Internet. The new high-memory instance costs $0.50 per hour, and comes with 17.1GB of RAM, two virtual cores and 420GB of instance storage. 

This option is targeted at a niche of the market that might require a large amount of working memory but with only moderate storage space. Commenting on the advantage of more memory, Redmonk analyst Michael Coté said "simply having more memory to work with is an effective way to brute-force much computation."

In case you're wondering if Amazon is making a profit on the new offering, SearchCloudComputing.com did a quick calculation based on full retail prices of the hardware required to power the new instance. The site came to the conclusion that a single hardware box will make "EC2 $2.00 per hour, or $17,500 per year." This works out to a nice gross profit of around 290%.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at SearchCloudComputing.com
- check out the article at PC World 

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