The M2 instance family, first available in October 2009, is a previous generation of Memory Optimized instances featuring Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors. These instances offered increased memory (up to 68.4 GiB) and enhanced I/O performance compared to the M1 family. They included local instance storage, such as 420 GB on the m2.xlarge, and provided moderate network performance. The M2 family was specifically designed for memory-intensive applications like high-performance databases and data warehousing.