Amazon Announces S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS)

This morning I received an email from Amazon.com announcing a new storage option in their “Cloud” offering.  It’s called “Reduced Redundancy Storage” or RRS.

Unlike their “standard” S3 storage offering which has an SLA of 99.999999999% at $0.150 per Gig Per Month for the first 50TB used, RRS will only come with an SLA of 99.99% at $0.10 per gigabyte per month.  After 50TB the price goes down so if this is interesting to you, you should take a look at the full S3 pricing sheet.  One thing to keep in mind is along with the Data Storage costs, after June 30th 2010, there will also be a data transfer cost as well.

Here’s the full announcement:

Dear Amazon S3 Customer,

We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3. It provides a cost-effective solution for distributing or sharing content that is durably stored elsewhere, or for storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced. The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage does, and thus is even more cost effective. Both storage options are designed to be highly available, and both are backed by Amazon S3’s Service Level Agreement.

Once customer data is stored using either Amazon S3’s standard or reduced redundancy storage options, Amazon S3 maintains durability by quickly detecting failed, corrupted, or unresponsive devices and restoring redundancy by re-replicating the data. Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, while RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.

Pricing for Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage starts at only $0.10 per gigabyte per month and decreases as you store more data. To get started using RRS and Amazon S3, visit http://aws.amazon.com/s3 or learn more by joining our May 26 webinar.

Sincerely,

The Amazon S3 Team