The release of new Dense-storage instances will help to provide additional compute power and memory.

Amazon has announced the release of a new generation of Dense-storage instances.

The new D2 instances are designed to provide additional compute power and memory, with the ability to sustain a high rate of sequential disk I/O for access to extremely large data sets.

The instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 processors, which will run at a base clock frequency of 2.4GHz and come in four instance sizes.

Amazon has recommended that in order to ensure the best disk throughput performance from D2 instances on Linux, that the most recent version is being used.

Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for the Amazon Web Services, wrote on the company blog to make the announcement, he said: "With Enhanced Networking and extremely high sequential high I/O rates, these instances will chew through your Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehouse, log processing, and MapReduce jobs."

"They will also make great hosts for your network file systems and data warehouses. In order to take advantage of Enhanced Networking, you need to use recent versions of the appropriate Windows or Linux AMIs and run inside of a VPC."

Currently priced for the U.S. the most expensive instance, d2.8xlarge, with an Instance Storage of 48TB and 10Gbps network performance on Linux on-demand will be $.5.520.