Amazon opens Redshift data warehouse to Joe Public
Traditional IT companies nervously stare at ground
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Amazon's Redshift cloudy data warehousing service is now available for general consumption after a trial among blessed customers.
The pay-as-you-go technology, which scales from around 200GB into the petabyte range, represents a direct threat to the warehousing divisions of IBM, Oracle, Teradata, and EMC (Greenplum).
Redshift does "10 times the performance at 1/10th the cost of the on-premises data warehouses that are commonly used today," the company wrote in a blog post announcing the service's availability on Friday.
Its architecture is based around columnar data storage, advanced compression, and fast disk and network I/O.
This, combined with its roots in the open source PostgreSQL database, has prompted The Reg to speculate that Amazon has managed to parallelize the PostgreSQL technology.
The warehouse dovetails into other major AWS components, like the S3 storage cloud and DynamoDB. It can suck in data from Amazon RDS, Elastic MapReduce and data sources in EC2 instances via the the recently-launched AWS Data Pipeline.
Pricing for the service can go to as low as $999 per year per terabyte, if using three-year reserved instances. As is typical, the service will initially be run out of Amazon's main data center – US East in Northern Virginia – with expansion occurring around the world "in the coming months."
The service was announced back in November at Amazon's inaugural cloud conference, AWS re:invent.
Redshift is designed to appeal to companies that either don't have the cash to pay for pricey hardware and software from typical warehousing stalwarts like IBM, Oracle, Teradata and Greenplum, or that want to trim their staffing and equipment budget.
This goes to the heart of the AWS cloud proposition: take on a bit of risk in terms of availability, and in exchange get rid of expensive capital items and save on employee headcount, especially DBAs. A good thing for companies, certainly, but a somewhat frightening prospect for IT workers. ®
COMMENTS
Any organisation which sees the news from 2e2 or the Heroku story from earlier today
and still trusts their corporate data retention and processing functions to 'the cloud' deserves all of the crap which will inevitably come their way.
Re: Get your SLAs and DR plans in order!
Whose home? Are there children, pets, or hungry velociraptors on the premises?
Whose safe deposit box? How much does it cost p.a.?
And who gets to whizz around on the company Segway to do the incremental updates from a USB stick?
I'm no fan of fluffy clouds for cloud's sake, but for low risk businesses who are just archiving to meet DP regs, offsite storage is a reasonable penny-pinching option.
(As long as there's a filter in the plughole that's capable of catching babies)
trim the staffing
how I love such gentleness. How rude would it be to call it what it really means: make people jobless.
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