This morning my spam filter caught this message from Amazon announcing the new Amazon Block Storage service. I’m looking forward to seeing this work it’s way into implementations from hosting companies that are currently re-selling a service layer on top of the already interesting EC2.

One of the largest drawbacks with EC2 (and a major reason I’ve stayed away from it with a 10′ pole) has been the lack of persistent storage. If your just purchasing occasional horsepower - say for a large compute project - you would have to configure your instance - import your data - do your calculations etc and then bring all your data back down. How many times have you needed to wait until the middle of the night to run complex queries or analysis on your data and didn’t want to take down your database to do it? It’s been more than I can count for me. Now you can run the server only when you need it. I can see this a serious boon for folks wanting to do data analysis but don’t need the large EC2 container running over weekends and holidays but don’t want to pay for transfer costs to and from local sources (or deal with pushing data in and out of S3).

From the email:

Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.

Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.

Tags: amazon, block storage, cloud computing, cluster, ebs, ec2, s3

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.