Amazon EC2 D3 & D3en Instances

Run dense storage workloads with the highest capacity local storage in the cloud
Get started with D3 Instances

Why Amazon EC2 D3 Instances?

Amazon EC2 D3 and D3en instances provide cost-effective, high capacity local storage-per-vCPU for massively-scaled storage workloads. D3 and D3en instances are the next generation of dense HDD storage instances, offering 30% higher processor performance, increased capacity, and reduced cost compared to D2 instances. Additionally, D3 instances provide 2.5x higher networking speed and 45% higher disk throughput compared to D2 instances. D3en instances, enhanced storage and high-speed networking variants, provide 7.5x higher networking speed, 100% higher disk throughput, 7x more storage capacity (up to 336 TB), and 80% lower cost-per-TB of storage compared to D2 instances.

D3 instances are a great fit for dense storage workloads including big data and analytics, data warehousing, and high scale file systems. D3en instances are a great fit for dense and distributed workloads including high capacity data lakes, clustered file systems, and other multi-node storage systems with significant inter-node I/O. With D3 and D3en instances, you can easily migrate from previous-generation D2 instances or on-premises infrastructure to a platform optimized for dense HDD storage workloads.

Benefits

Next-generation Amazon EC2 D3 instances provide increased price-performance, and lower cost than D2 instances. D3 and D3en instances feature 30% higher compute performance than D2 instances. D3en instances also offer 80% lower cost-per-TB of storage compared to D2 instances.

D3 and D3en instances satisfy the needs of applications with high requirements for sequential storage throughput. D3 and D3en instances enable 45% and 100% higher disk throughput respectively compared to D2 instances. D3 and D3en instances provide 2.5x and 7.5x higher networking throughput respectively than D2 instances, allowing for high speed multi-node configurations.

D3 and D3en instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. This frees up additional compute, memory and I/O, allowing your applications to do more with available hardware resources including local, HDD storage.

D3 versus D3en Instance Comparison

Amazon EC2 D3 Instances
D3 instances provide an easy transition from D2 instances, by offering the same storage-to-vCPU ratio as D2 instances. D3 instances are a great fit for applications which benefit from high scale HDD capacity and throughput in a single node, or where inter-node bandwidth is less than 25 Gbps.

Features

  • Capacity ranges from 6 to 48 TB of local HDD storage
  • A range of 580 MiB/s to 4,600 MiB/s of aggregated disk throughput 
  • Up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth
  • 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) Processors with a sustained all core turbo frequency of up to 3.1 GHz
  • Up to 256 GiB of memory
  • Four different instance sizes
  • Built on AWS Nitro System

Use Cases

  • File systems such as HDFS and MapReduce 
  • Big Data and analytics workloads such as Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Spark, Hadoop, and SAS
  • Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Data warehouse such as Redshift, HPE Vertica
  • Log or data processing applications such as Kafka, Elastic Search

Amazon EC2 D3en Instances
D3en instances offer a 3.5x higher storage-to-vCPU ratio compared to D2 instances. D3en instances are a great fit for applications that can benefit from the highest capacity local HDD storage in the cloud, where inter-node bandwidth is up to 75 Gbps.

Features

  • Capacity ranges from 28 to 336 TB of local HDD storage 
  • A range of 500 MiB/s up to 6,200 MiB/s of aggregated disk throughput
  • Up to 75 Gbps of network bandwidth
  • 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) Processors with a sustained all core turbo frequency of up to 3.1 GHz
  • Up to 192 GiB of memory
  • Six different instance sizes
  • Built on AWS Nitro System

Use Cases

  • Multi-node file storage systems such as Lustre, BeeGFS, GPFS, VxCFS, and GFS2
  • High capacity data lakes with consistent sequential I/O performance

Product Details

  • D3
  • Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Instance Storage (TB) Aggregate Disk Throughput (MiB/s) Network Bandwidth (Gbps) EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)

    d3.xlarge

    4

    32

    3 x 2 HDD

    580

    Up to 15

    850

    d3.2xlarge

    8

    64

    6 x 2 HDD

    1,100

    Up to 15

    1,700

    d3.4xlarge

    16

    128

    12 x 2 HDD

    2,300

    Up to 15

    2,800

    d3.8xlarge

    32

    256

    24 x 2 HDD

    4,600

    25

    5,000

    *128k block sizes, sequential read and write (rounded to nearest 100 except for xlarge)

  • D3en
  • Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Instance Storage (TB) Aggregate Disk Throughput (MiB/s) Network Bandwidth (Gbps) EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)

    d3en.xlarge

    4

    16

    2 x 14 HDD

    500

    Up to 25

    850

    d3en.2xlarge

    8

    32

    4 x 14 HDD

    1,000

    Up to 25

    1,700

    d3en.4xlarge

    16

    64

    8 x 14 HDD

    2,000

    25

    2,800

    d3en.6xlarge

    24

    96

    12 x 14 HDD

    3,100

    40

    4,000

    d3en.8xlarge

    32

    128

    16 x 14 HDD

    4,100

    50

    5,000

    d3en.12xlarge

    48

    192

    24 x 14 HDD

    6,200

    75

    7,000

    *128k block sizes, sequential read and write (rounded to nearest 100)

All instances have the following specs:

  • Up to 3.1 GHz 2nd Generation all core turbo Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors
  • Intel AVX†, Intel AVX2†, Intel AVX-512†, Intel Turbo 
  • Enhanced Networking