Amazon Web Services has announced Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS), a new storage option within the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) intended to help customers reduce costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage.
The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage does, and thus is even more cost effective. Both storage options are designed to be highly available, and both are backed by Amazon S3’s Service Level Agreement.
"Customers who are using Amazon S3 to share media content that is durably stored elsewhere, or who are storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced, have told us that they do not always require the level of durability offered by Amazon S3. They have asked us for an even more cost-effective storage solution for this type of data," says Amazon's Alyssa Henry." Reduced Redundancy Storage provides lower redundancy at a lower price, while still giving customers high availability."
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives developersaccess to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, and cost-effective infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. Amazon S3's standard and reduced redundancy options both store data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices, but with RRS, data is replicated fewer times, so the cost is less. Once customer data is stored, Amazon S3 maintains durability by quickly detecting failed, corrupted, or unresponsive devices and restoring redundancy by re-replicating the data. Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, while RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and to sustain the loss of data in a single facility. Pricing for Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage starts at only $0.10 per gigabyte and decreases as you store more data.
