The High Storage Eight Extra Large instances are intended for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 117 GB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.
Read more here – http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-instance-family.html
Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve Amazon AWS suffered a major outage due to some API malfunction that crippled the giant movie and TV Internet subscription service, Netflix.
Read more here – http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/24/netflix-crippled-on-christmas-eve-by-aws-outages/