Amazon's New Storage Service

dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it."

Comments

Encryption

[grahamsz]

I wonder how long it'll take to build a backup solution that encrypts your data locally with a private key before sending it off to amazon. That way they wouldn't be able to look through it, and at 15c/month/gig it'd be pretty affordable for home backups

Anyone remember GoogleZon?

[Nomihn0]

This is an interesting case of diversification. Amazon, no longer content to be the middle man e-tailer, is shifting it's weight into Google's territory with a service-based profit model. If this trend continues at Amazon, I have to wonder if Google will make a hostile bid for its newfound competitor.
 
  Here is a Link to EPIC, a speculative piece on the future of media, including the GoogleZon segment.

Statistics can be your friend

[the ed menace]

In general you might think that the cost per gig you pay and the cost per gig that Amazon pays is similar. And you would be right. But to obtain high reliability you will pay more.

Amazon, or anybody who tries to build a large distributed storage service, can spread out the probability of disk errors over a larger set of users than you are able to do. The marginal cost to replace a disk that has failed, on a per user basis, is therefore lower for Amazon.

Moreover, the overhead to manage many disks does not increase linearly to the number of disks. Put another way, their per user cost to manage the disks is lower than you.

The cost equation is less about purchasing the storage than maintaining it through the inevitable failures over time. This makes the gigabyte-based usage cost very fair, since it is proportional to the rate of error. The access cost manages their bandwidth expense.

What I would like from a service like this is a pricing guarantee -- if they maintain the same pricing two years from now, it will be a ripoff given the diminishing cost of storage and bandwidth. It would be nice to have it pegged to some kind of disk/bandwidth industry index.

Backup Buddies?

[cgenman]

It seems like this new service would be best for offsite backup of prescious data.

However, it isn't all that cost-effective. A local disk is very cheap comparatively, but (as a friend of mine found out) if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.

Are there any services out there which connects people with reasonable connections over long distances to back-up eachothers data? I'd be willing to get a new 80GB drive and make it available via a private FTP server if someone else would do the same for me.

Or are there cheaper offsite solutions than Amazon's?

BitTorrent

[elrond1999]

Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Amazon supports BitTorrent for the storage. Does that mean they run the tracker? Interesting way to save on transfer fees that :)

Re:Plus $0.20 per Gb transferred!!!

[OpticalPaul]

When Amazon lets me pay for the storage, and have other registered users pay the bandwidth charges (plus my profit) to access my content, then they'll have an interesting business. Unless Google beats them to it.

As it is, online remote storage with ongoing upload, download, and storage fees hardly seems interesting.

Let's compare

[EmagGeek]

Let's take a 300GB System that needs to be backed up:

900GB at $0.20/gb = $180.00 transfer fee
Monthly at $0.15/gb = $135.00/month recurring charge
Weekly incremental of 30GB = $6.00/wk = $24/mo recurring charge

So $180.00 + $159/month = $2088 just for the first year, plus whatever you have to pay your ISP for abusive bandwidth charges.

Let's look at it from another perspective:

4 WD3200SD 320GB Raid-Edition SATA Drives: About $600
1 4-Port SATA Raid Card: About $250
Expected Lifetime: 5 years

So, buying a whole other raid-5 array to mirror your 900GB of stuff costs nearly $10K to store for 5 years on Amazon versus $850 to store locally. Hell, even if you were paranoid and replaced one of the hard disks every 3 months, you'd still be at less than half the cost.

I won't even get into which is more secure. If it's not on your site or some place you have physical control over, it is not secure.