hi1.4xlarge: AWS SSD EC2 High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (and a Dr Pepper)

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is crowing about its super-fast, SSD-backed, hi1.4xlarge AWS EC2 instance type. Its full name is quite a mouthful: High I/O Quadruple Extra Large, but Amazon claims it can achieve 120,000 IOPS. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers scrape together $3.10 to try it for an hour.

By Richi Jennings: Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Why some font names begin with '@'...
  
  
Brandon Butler serves up the news: [You're fired -Ed.]

AWS's High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instance in...EC2 includes 2TB of local SSD. ... [Amazon] says it can achieve...120,000 random read [and] 85,000 write IOPS. ...it's aimed at NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.
...
AWS's offering appears to be one of the highest capacity SSD-backed cloud-based services. ... The service is currently only available in AWS's US East...and EU West region[s]. ... On-demand instances are available [from] $3.10 per hour.      

       
Barb Darrow is not a fan of Onika Tanya "Nicki" Minaj:

The new “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large”  instances store and retrieve lots of data very fast.
...
The availability of solid state storage, which is faster and more expensive...has become a battleground...as the price for SSDs falls. ... The specs for the new instances: ...

• 8 virtual cores...35 ECU ...
• HVM and PVM virtualization
• 60.5 GB of RAM
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet...with support for cluster placement groups ...
• SSD-backed storage...as a pair of 1 TB volumes.      

And Amazon's Jeff Barr opens the kimono:

...you haven't been shy about asking us for more locations, more features, more storage, or more speed...[so] we are introducing a new family of EC2 instances that are designed to run low-latency, I/O-intensive applications.
...
...this storage is failure resilient, and will survive a reboot, but you should back it up to Amazon S3. ... We plan to make this new instance type available in several other AWS Regions before the end of the year.      

But Joseph Poon strikes a note of caution:

If you use current generation controllers...you're going to have a bad time if you turn on RAID.
...
TRIM...isn't supported with RAID on SSD today...so you're going to see performance plummet...after you do one pass of writes. ... In many RAID configurations...performance is going to suck from the get-go.
...
If you don't know to look for this issue, you're going to be scratching your head when your...write throughput is worse than a single 7200rpm drive. ... Amazon may have solved this for you already...and they might be running their own software striping...be sure to test it out fully first.      

Meanwhile, MongoHQ's Kurt Mackey hints that Amazon may be a victim of its own success already:

Whoops, Amazon won't let us have any more hi1.4xlarge instances with those delicious SSDs in them...      

      
And Finally...
Why some font names begin with '@' 

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. He's also the main author of Computerworld's The Long View and IT Blogwatch -- for which he has won ASBPE and Neal awards. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, Richi also publishes a full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.