AWS enters NAS market

Amazon has set its sights firmly on enterprise storage vendors such as Dell and Seagate with the launch of a new storage service that provides a common file system for multiple EC2 virtual machines on Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) will be available later this year and represents the company’s first foray into the network attached storage (NAS) market.

The solution - based on the standard NFSv4 protocol - is designed to help organisations managing workloads of all sizes to grow or shrink file storage as required and to remove the need for capacity planning.

The new service offers up to a petabyte of data and is targeted at customers seeking file storage for content repositories, development environments, web server farms, home directories and applications.

Customers are able to provision files quickly using the company’s management console and command line interface with standard APIs.

Because it supports the standard NFS protocol, EFS will work with most existing file system tools and applications so developers can simply mount and manage with any standard tool.

Data is automatically replicated across different availability zones.

The solution adds breadth to Amazon's other storage offerings including Glacier for archiving, S3 for object storage and Elastic Block store for general purpose computing.

No firm date has been announced for availability beyond later this year. Pricing is planned at US$0.30 (A$0.39) per gigabyte per month.