Amazon opens Redshift cloud data warehouse beta

Amazon has announced a limited public beta of its Redshift cloud data warehouse service.

Evangelist Jeff Barr said on the Amazon Web Services blog that customers wanting to build and run a "good-sized data warehouse" of their own could expect to pay $US19,000 to $US25,000 ($18,161 to $23,896) a terabyte a year.

By comparison, Redshift pricing is set at US$3723 ($3560) per terabyte per year for on-demand access, dropping to US$2190 ($2095) and US$999 (A$955) for one and three year reserved contracts respectively.

The service is scalable and customers can increase the number of nodes in the data warehouse without downtime, Amazon said.

Two node types are avaliable for provisioning data warehouse clusters, coming in at 2TB or 16TB of compressed storage, respectively.

Amazon also said Redshift runs on hardware optimised for data warehousing with locally attached storage and 10G Ethernet connections between the nodes for improved performance.

It features columnar storage with data compression to reduce the amount of I/O for queries and also a massively parallel architecture for scalability.

Redshift is in invitation-only limited public beta mode currently, and Amazon has not given a launch date for the service.

It has been tested by AWS customers such as Netflix, JPL and Flipboard as part of a private beta.

Business intelligence providers Jaspersoft and Microstrategy have certified Redshift, and Amazon said more such tools will be available in the AWS Marketplace.

Separately, Amazon has also cut its S3 storage service pricing for all areas, including the Sydney region.

All prices are in US dollars and effective from December 1 this year.