AWS flashes newly-enlarged 16TB (SS)D that's faster at the old in-out-in-out

Amazon Web Services has, as promised last year, revealed a colossal new virtual cloudy solid state disk with colossal IOPS.

The new elastic block storage Volumes offer up to 16 terabytes of capacity, all presented as a single volume, and can deliver up to 20,000 IOPS at a top speed of 320 Mbps. Those speeds come with “provisioned” IOPS. If you don't want to shell out for the guaranteed performance, lesser “general purpose” disks of 16TB/10,000 IOPS/160 Mbps can be yours.

You'll pay US$0.125 per GB-month for the disk and then $0.065 per provisioned IOPS-month in the provisioned plan. The lesser disks cost a mere $0.10 per GB-month.

The cloudy colossus has also announced it will make data from the USA's Landsat program available for free. Landsat is a US government program to capture and publish satellite images of Earth. AWS has tossed several years worth of the program's images into S3 buckets connected here.

Would-be users will need to prepare themselves to work with the GeoTIFF format, as that's how the files have been made available. There's also an image browser to be had if you want to mess about with the data, or have a go at automating retrieval. ®