Amazon Web Services announced a new type of high-I/O (input/output) virtual-machine instance available through its Elastic Compute Cloud.

Called hi1.4xlarge, short for High I/O Quadruple Extra Large, each of these instances feature local solid-state-drive (SSD) storage, eight compute cores and 60.5GB of memory. They each have two 1TB SSDs and a 10Gbps network-interface card that can be used to connect them with each other.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, said the new instances can be particularly beneficial in database applications.

“The I/O requirements of database engines, regardless whether they are relational or non-relation (NoSQL) DBMS’s (database management systems) can be very demanding,” Vogels wrote in a blog post. “Increasingly randomized access and burst I/O through aggregation put strains on any I/O subsystem, physical or virtual, attached or remote.”

The instances get their high I/O performance from SSDs. Using Xen PV virtualization, they deliver 120,000 IOPS for 4,000 random reads, while using HVM or Windows virtualization provides 90,000.

By comparison, a high-performance 15,000 RPM spinning disk will provide “a bit over a hundred IOPS at best,” Vogels wrote.

“Magnetic disks are rapidly starting to exhibit tape-like properties and with modern workloads being increasingly random, they are becoming less and less suitable as a storage system,” he wrote.

At the moment, the new high-I/O instances are available in EC2’s US East availability zone (data center in Northern Virginia) and EU West (an Ireland data center), Jeff Barr, a web services evangelist at Amazon, wrote in a blog post. The company is planning to add more availability zones before the end of the year.