A while ago I had a discussion with someone about the future of server infrastructure. Among other things, we were wondering whether companies will continue to run on dedicated servers or if eventually everyone just ends up in a Cloud environment. During the discussion I raised a point that in principle Cloud is a great idea that will keep attracting more and more people, but it is missing one important piece that stops many from using it – a high performance storage. Apparently, this has just changed.
Yesterday I received an e-mail announcing a new EC2 instance type – hi1.4xlarge. It features 16 logical CPUs (35 ECUs), 60GB of RAM, and… two 1TB SSD-based disk volumes! These are great specs that should work for nearly any database. Even assuming someone has a MySQL database larger than 2TB, not all tables will
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