Amazon launches cloud database with analytics tools, lowers S3 pricing

Amazon releases major new enterprise-focused data warehousing product

At its first user conference, called AWS re: Invent, Amazon Web Services today launched its newest cloud-based service, called Redshift. Meant to be a petabyte-scale data warehouse, AWS officials say Redshift allows businesses to drop their data warehousing costs by 10 times compared to on-premise systems.

Redshift has launched in a limited beta and is expected to be fully rolled out next year.

Redshift is aimed directly at on-premise data warehousing systems, most notably from Oracle, SQL Server and Green Plum. "All these guys are suddenly confronted with a new full-featured SQL interface completely in the cloud with dramatically lower pricing," says Merv Adrian, a Gartner analyst who tracks big data. "This is a potentially massive disruption for traditional data warehousing vendors, but it can't come as a surprise."

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Gartner's Adrian says he expects businesses of all sizes to aggressively investigate potential use cases for Redshift, but traditional concerns around what sort of data business are comfortable storing in the cloud vs. on their own premises will persist.

In addition to Redshift, the other major announcement from the first day of AWS's user conference was another price reduction, this time for its S3. This follows a drop in prices for EC2 instance types just a few weeks ago. S3 instances dropped on average by 25% across the board. Up to 1TB of data stored in Amazon's cloud has dropped in price from $0.125 to $0.095 per GB, a 24% drop. Up to 4,000 TB of storage dropped in price from $0.08 to $0.060, a 25% drop.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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