Amazon has released some fairly impressive numbers showcasing the growth of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) over the years. By the end of the first quarter of 2012, there were 905 billion objects stored, and the service routinely handles 650,000 requests per second for those objects, with peaks that go even higher. To put that in perspective, that’s up from 262 billion objects stored just two years ago and up from 762 billion by Q4 2011.
Or maybe it’s more impressive when you look further back: 2.9 billion in 2006, for example. And how fast is it growing? Well, says Amazon, every day, over a a billion objects are added. That’s how fast. → Read More
Amazon Web Services this morning announced the general availability of AWS Import/Export for Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka S3), with a new web service interface that enables easy management of data transfers and migrations.
According to the press release, the new feature accelerates moving large amounts of data in and out using portable storage devices for transport. For large data sets, AWS Import/Export is said to be ‘significantly faster’ than transfers over the Internet. → Read More
Web applications require a lot of data storage. All the videos uploaded to YouTube, for example, are estimated to take up more than 500 terabytes of storage. Google’s servers overall process one petabyte of data every hour or so. Google had to create its own Web-scale file system to handle all the data that it processes and stores. As Web-scale computing and the needs of plain-old enterprise storage grow, many more companies are wishing they had a file system like Google’s.
Monday, a startup called ParaScale is launching a private beta of a commercial-grade storage software that uses a similar approach to Google’s own in-house system. (ParaScale nearly made it into TechCrunch50 this year, but was just shy of making the cut, largely because it was no longer in stealth mode). It offers a file system that can run on a cluster of any off-the-shelf Linux servers.
Companies can keep adding as many servers as they need, with each one acting as a redundant node. The software runs on the cluster as whole, treating it as one giant file system. This creates private cloud storage that companies can host themselves inside their own firewalls. ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan says customers can expect to pay about $1 per gigabyte, depending on their server costs. → Read More
Flexiscale, a new UK-based on-demand computing service aimed at Web 2.0 startups plans to compete with Amazon’s EC2/S3 service. The move – announced at today’s Future of Web Apps conference in London – is significant because there are so few ‘pay as you go’ hosting solutions in Europe, so the launch of a new service shows there’s real demand of this kind of scalable hosting for startups. Speaking to a few people about this space, I hear that architecturally Flexiscale could well have a better product than Amazon. That’s a big claim. But perhaps one of the key feathers in Flexiscale’s service is that (as well as Linux) it supports Windows while Amazon only does Linux, and offers an SLA, which the latter doesn’t. For more detail on this check out TechCrunch UK. See our recent coverage of Nirvanix, a U.S. based S3 competitor as well. → Read More
Startup Phanfare, which stores a lot of user generated media, announced today that they are in the process of moving all of their backups of stored user data – 40 terabytes – to Amazon’s S3 storage service. Amazon S3 has been on a bit of a roll lately, recently surpassing 5 billion stored objects and growing fast. It’s also racking up a number of passionate users who swear by it for reliability and cost savings. Phanfare is just the most recent example, albeit a large one. Phanfare stopped short of moving all data over to S3, though. For now they are just moving backups. They admit they’d save more money by moving the storage function entirely to Amazon, but note that: After all, right now, Amazon does not provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or even a phone number to call if you are unhappy with the Amazon web service. I don’t expect that Amazon will ever lose our data of course, but we would like an SLA before we bet our customer’s data on that. On the subject of Amazon, rumor has it that they’ll be adding to their storage and computing web services by year end – and adding a MySQL database web service to compliment the other two. CrunchBase Information Phanfare Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Just over three months ago Amazon made a major move beyond online retail with the launch of its S3 grid storage service. The company today released some information about the program’s early progress. Online storage as a utility might seem unexciting to some, but it could be a real boon to innovation. S3 just passed 800 million discrete objects stored and has some interesting customers using the service. At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred, the effort is poised to change the game for web services previously weighed down by the requirements of storing their own data. Use cases range from large to small. Microsoft is using it to serve up its MSDN Direct Student Download to students around the world. Photosharing service Smugmug says it’s saved $500,000 by using S3 for its database that adds 10 terabytes of images each month. There are a number of start-ups leveraging S3 as their back-end for unique front-end storage apps. Other companies highlighted as using S3 include Altexa, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk and MediaSilo. We profiled S3 when it launched and said it could be a game changer. That potential appears to be beginning to bear fruit. We’ve covered a number of other online storage options here as well. You’re probably familiar with the argument that Net Neutrality is essential for innovation because small start ups must have access to affordable data transfer infrastructure. The same is true for storage – S3 has the potential to facilitate loads of innovation by commoditizing what was in the past a substantial resource drain for data intensive services. This is only the beginning and I’ll be excited to see more companies or features appear for which data storage is a solved problem. → Read More
Episode 3 of TalkCrunch is up. We invited in two key Amazon S3 team members, Adam Selipsky (VP of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services) and Dave Barth (Product Manager for S3), to talk about Amazon’s exciting new Grid Storage web service. As I wrote previously, S3 provides a terrific opportunity for startups with great ideas for a storage user interface to avoid building a back end storage infrastructure. Amazon is offering extremely low pricing and a very dependable infrastructure. For some people, S3 will allow them to launch a service that they otherwise couldn’t have built. Nik Cubrilovic, the CEO of startup Omnidrive, was co-host of the show (as was Keith Teare) and we tried to convince him, unsuccesfully, to switch to S3 for the back-end of his storage. Talkcrunch continues to do well after its first three shows. It is currently included in the iTunes “new and notable” section and is on of the top 20 technology podcasts (as of right now it is #12). → Read More
Amazon Web Service is launching a new web service tonight called S3 – which stands for “Simple Storage Service”. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”. I was able to speak with Adam Selipsky (Amazon Web Services VP of Product Management and Developer Relations), Dave Barth (Product Manager for Amazon S3) and Andrew Herdener (Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon) today about the service. They’ve built the back end for the number one requested company that I wrote about late last year – reliable and cheap online storage. I’ve been watching this space very closely, even profiling a number of new entrants, and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now). Until now, a sophisticated and scalable data storage infrastructure like Amazon’s has been beyond the reach of small developers. Amazon S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure. Here are the facts: This is a web service, and so Amazon is not releasing a customer facing service. They are offering standards-based REST and SOAP web services interfaces for developers. Entire classes of companies can be built on S3 that would not have been possible before due to infrastructure costs for the developer. Virtually any file type is allowed, up to 5 GB. Files may be set as public, shared or private and will have a unique URL. Pricing is cheaper than anything else I’ve seen: $0.15 per GB of storage per month, and $0.20 for each GB of data transferred up or downstream. This translates to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage, net of any transfer fees (to move that much data on to S3 would be a one time cost of $20). These prices are going to be significantly below the development and ongoing costs for small or medium sized storage projects – meaning a lot of the front end services I’ve previously profiled will be much better off moving their entire back end to S3. This is game changing. See Rob Hof at → Read More
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