Also gives you 224 physical CPU cores (448 logical cores).<p>Requires a 3-year reservation, and "the effective hourly rate for the All Upfront 3-Year Reservation for a u-12tb1.metal Dedicated Host in the US East (N. Virginia) Region is $30.539 per hour."<p>Works out to $267,512.88 per year, or $802,538.64 for the 3-year term. I wonder how that compares to building your own on-premise host with that much RAM (obviously, there's operational costs to consider as well).<p>Also, don't miss the last line: "We’re not stopping at 12 TiB, and are planning to launch instances with 18 TiB and 24 TiB of memory in 2019."
One of the neat things of instances w/ this scale of memory is that we can once again start avoiding the perils of distributed computation. Because you have immense data locality, a lot of computations can be parallelized much more efficiently if they involve large sequences of trivially parallelizable tasks that are short-lived.
Is SAP HANA any good?<p>I don't have any experience with it but it's the one single example that's always used in every vendor post about high-memory machines.
Interesting that you can't simply spin one up on your own; you have to contact AWS to get the process started. Maybe it's simply because of the amount of money you're committing to spend, but I find the possibility that they're now offering an instance type that requires them to physically provision it for you intriguing.
I wish “your data fits in memory”[0] was still up.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581862" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581862</a>
I would like to see if you can build such a monster yourself, and how much would it cost? Did Amazon designed their own motherboards or used some off the shelf boards?
<i>Retail</i> price of the server components (no racks, PDUs, busbars, fibre drop, network switch, KVM, circuit-breaker, rack&stack, rack anti-tip bracing, artistic cabling, tech support):<p>CPU 8176M: $11,805.00 USD x 8 = $94,440.00<p>RAM 64GB: $866.23 x 192 = $166,316.16<p>Chassis + 2x 10 GbE NICs + SSD boot device: ~$8000<p>Total: ~$269k USD<p>AWS price: $803k<p>Under 150% gross profit margin (without electricity, fibre or real-state) over 3 years. I'd say the closer figure is ~ $300-400k per box for single company-scale servers, leading to a closer-to-net profit Amazon profit of around 100%<p>Although, it's possible to keep a server beyond its lifecycle and run it into the ground once it's already paid-for, as opposed to getting nothing at the end of the Amazon lease.<p>There's trade-offs for both cases; some people would rather pay more to not have to deal with quotes, vendors or shipping issues.