Retail and cloud services giant Amazon.com has announced a new hosted data warehouse offering named Redshift.
"Amazon Redshift is a massively parallel, fully-managed data warehouse service, designed for data sets from hundreds of gigabytes to several petabytes in size, and appropriate for an organisation of any size — from a startup to a multi-national — at a price point that will take you by surprise," wrote Amazon Web Services envangelist Jeff Barr.
"Amazon Redshift is fully managed, so you no longer need to worry about provisioning hardware, installation, configuration or patching of system or database software," Barr wrote. "Because your business is dependent on your data, Amazon Redshift takes care to protect it by replicating all data within the cluster as well as in S3."
The company claims that it will be substantially cheaper to use than conventional on-premise data warehouses.
"We did the math and found that it would generally cost you between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte per year at list prices to build and run a good-sized data warehouse on your own," Barr wrote. "Amazon Redshift, all-in, will cost you less than $1,000 per terabyte per year. For that price you get all of the benefits that I listed above without any of the operational headaches associated with building and running your own data warehouse."
So far, business intelligence companies Jaspersoft and Microstrategy have certified the product, and Amazon says more will follow.
At the moment, Redshift is only available under a public beta, and only hosted in Amazon’s Virginia data centre. Customers including video site Netflix and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are already using the service.
"We’re delighted to have a new, fast and low-cost option for analysing massive amounts of data,” said Tom Soderstrom, CTO at the NASA JPL’s Office of the CIO, in a statment. "This new service will also allow us to create new types of big data analytics that will lead to new discoveries."
The announcement adds data warehousing to the ever-growing list of technology markets that Amazon Web Services is threatening to disrupt with its cloud services.
According to reseach company TechNavio, the global data warehousing market is currently growing by just over 10% a year.
"Consolidation in the Global Data Warehousing market is increasing", the company said earlier this year. "As more cloud-based companies are venturing into the market, the rate of acquisitions is expected to increase."
