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July 12, 2006

Amazon releases early info on S3 storage use

Marshall Kirkpatrick

28 comments »

Just over three months ago Amazon made a major move beyond online retail with the launch of its S3 grid storage service. The company today released some information about the program’s early progress. Online storage as a utility might seem unexciting to some, but it could be a real boon to innovation. S3 just passed 800 million discrete objects stored and has some interesting customers using the service. At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred, the effort is poised to change the game for web services previously weighed down by the requirements of storing their own data.

Use cases range from large to small. Microsoft is using it to serve up its MSDN Direct Student Download to students around the world. Photosharing service Smugmug says it’s saved $500,000 by using S3 for its database that adds 10 terabytes of images each month. There are a number of start-ups leveraging S3 as their back-end for unique front-end storage apps. Other companies highlighted as using S3 include Altexa, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk and MediaSilo.

We profiled S3 when it launched and said it could be a game changer. That potential appears to be beginning to bear fruit. We’ve covered a number of other online storage options here as well.

You’re probably familiar with the argument that Net Neutrality is essential for innovation because small start ups must have access to affordable data transfer infrastructure. The same is true for storage - S3 has the potential to facilitate loads of innovation by commoditizing what was in the past a substantial resource drain for data intensive services. This is only the beginning and I’ll be excited to see more companies or features appear for which data storage is a solved problem.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Eric Willis

    July 12th, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    Wow! If that $500,000 figure for Smugmug is true, that is quite a significant amount to save in 3 months time.

  2. Moritz

    July 12th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    this artile has been online before earlier today and mentioned both jungledisk and elephantdrive at that point. how come you dropped that out now? does not make much sense to me…

    moritz

  3. Nick Pang | Wii Preorder

    July 12th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    how much will youtube save if smugmug saved that much? youtube spends $400K to $500K per month on bandwidth alone according to some analysts…

  4. telecommer

    July 12th, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    But in English, how does this help my site? http://www.telecommer.com

  5. Ravi

    July 12th, 2006 at 1:49 pm

    Sounds like exciting technology. But Retail and Data Storage do not gel together. I will be surprised if the adoption goes beyond startups and a few experimental usages. How are they gonna sell it? Whom are they gonna sell? Will they sell it to the enterprises? Will they have a direct sales force, support staff, professional services? Have they ever sold to enterprises? As a CIO, I would rather rely on a company that whose bread and butter is storage (or infrastrucure technology).

    What is Amazon doing in the storage business? I guess it is the outcome of the whim of a few guys, rather than a strategic direction.

    They should focus on building servcies focused on what they are known for.

  6. leafar

    July 12th, 2006 at 2:08 pm

    The Grid works !
    just another piece of the EPIC puzzle.
    http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/

  7. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 2:11 pm

    Leafar, good call. Long live Googlezon, huh? lol

  8. Ethiopic

    July 12th, 2006 at 2:43 pm

    Ravi is right on.

  9. Ben

    July 12th, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    Hey Moritz,

    We’ve apparently fallen off techcrunch but not the face of the earth.

    We’re at the Mashup Camp “Unconference” in Mountain View presenting ElephantDrive alongside Amazon. If geography permits, you should come check it out.

    bmw
    http://www.elephantdrive.com

  10. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    July 12th, 2006 at 4:32 pm

    My apologies, I’ve added links to the other companies also highlighted in the news.

  11. Beau Hartshorne

    July 12th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    Those SmugMug numbers are really impressive. Any idea what the estimates are based on? Were they able to lay off some employees? Did they save more on disk or bandwidth? Are they projections?

  12. larry

    July 12th, 2006 at 10:18 pm

    goMyPlace open reverse proxy does similar trick without need to move
    files around. Slightly different solution, but produces similar results.
    Use case - video bloger wishing to leverage existing ADSL connection at
    home. No problem with goMyPlace. Smart caching on the reverse proxy
    makes it possible to upload video file only once. After that the file is
    served directly from the proxy server. Even better - while PC/linux/Mac
    uploads the file first time this file can be downloaded simultaneously
    by the subscribers. Nobody requested the file - the file will not be
    uploaded.

    Open Source solution and completely free service

  13. Alex

    July 13th, 2006 at 9:32 am

    Has anyone read S3’s terms of service? There is essentially no recourse in case amazon loses your data and no guarantee that you will have access to that data in the future. Amazon can turn it off with the flip of a switch.

    I considered using it for the backend of a photo storage service, but didn’t think
    A)Customers would be comfortable knowing their pictures were being held somewhere else
    B)I could risk essentially betting the company on the hope that Amazon doesn’t lose files and/or turn off the service.

    Hearing that smugmug uses it though is very intruiging. I wonder if they have any special guarantees from Amazon……

  14. Srini

    July 13th, 2006 at 10:39 pm

    In response to Alex - it seems that Amazon itself uses S3 internally for many of its products. That’s about as good an SLA as you can get, if not better, and what convinved us to use S3 in our project.

  15. asurroca

    July 14th, 2006 at 11:41 pm

    So, it seems then that amazon.com has been using this system for its own storage for a while now, and decided that it was so good they could lease it out and make an extra buck and the same time. It definitely sounds more like something Google would have done, which begs the question: How long before we see Google Storage?

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