Amazon Web Services Now Offers SSD Storage Service

Amazon Web Services Now Offers SSD Storage Service
Jun 17, 2014
1 minute read
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Amazon Web Services has found a way to bring the advantages of speedy solid-state storage to its customers.

On June 17, the giant Web services provider made available a new SSD-backed volume type for its Amazon Elastic Block Store service that provides high-performance enterprise-level storage at what it describes as a low cost.

These highly available, general-purpose NAND flash volumes are engineered to provide fast performance for a wide range of workloads that could include standard workplace applications, small to medium-sized databases, test and development environments and bootup volumes, Amazon said.

General Purpose (SSD) solid-state volumes provide the capacity for applications to burst to 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of many applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte.

Users pay only for the storage they use; there are no additional charges for levels of I/O. Prices start at 10 cents per gigabyte.

Amazon customers can launch General Purpose (SSD) volumes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or AWS SDKs. The new SSD volumes are available in the U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), U.S. West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Brazil (Sao Paulo) regions.

For more information on Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes, go here.

Chris Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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