At its first re:Invent conference in Late November, Amazon announced Redshift, a new managed service for data warehousing. Amazon also offered details and customer examples that made AWS’ steady inroads toward enterprise, mainstream application acceptance very visible.
Redshift is made available via MPP nodes of 2TB (XL) or 16TB (8XL), running Paraccel’s high-performance columnar, compressed DBMS, scaling to 100 8XL nodes, or 1.6PB of compressed data. XL nodes have 2 virtual cores, with 15GB of memory, while 8XL nodes have 16 virtual cores and 120 GB of memory and operate on 10Gigabit ethernet.
Reserved pricing (the more likely scenario, involving a commitment of 1 year or 3 years) is set at “under $1000 per TB per year” for a 3 year commitment, combining upfront and hourly charges. Continuous, automated backup for up to 100% of the provisioned storage is free. Amazon does not charge for data transfer into or out of the data clusters. Network connections, of course, are not free – see Doug Henschen’s Information Week story for details.
This is a dramatic thrust in pricing, but it does not come without giving up some things.