Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers

Why Amazon’s EBS Should Worry Data Centers
Om Malik, Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 5:30 AM PT Comments (7)
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Amazon has announced Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), a persistent storage offering that can be used in tandem with applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With this move, it is turning up the heat on everyone from storage area network vendors, server companies and of course data center operators. Don’t be surprised if the company starts attracting corporations using its suite of web services.

With EBS, developers can deploy scalable solutions including relational databases, distributed file systems and Hadoop processing clusters. EBS is more adept for working with databases, as well apps that require a file system. You can now start and stop just like you would on a traditional physical server. This is a play for larger, corporate customers, a move that is long time coming.

First, some facts about the service:

* EBS volumes can be anwhere from 1 GB up to 1 TB.
* As a beta customer, you can create 20 EBS volumes with a total of 20 Terabytes.
* EBS costs storage plus I/O requests: $0.10 per GB per month & $0.10 per million I/O requests.
* EBS functionality is available via EC2 API using any number of tools, including command line and Elasticfox.