Amazon Launches $0.10 Per Gigabyte Online Storage

Amazon has launched an online storage option that offer less redundancy for lower cost than its standard Web storage service.

Reduced Redundancy Storage, introduced Wednesday, is an option within Amazon's Simple Storage Service. Called S3, the online storage offering, part of Amazon Web Services, provides unlimited storage through a Web interface. The service was first launched in March 2006.

With RRS, Amazon stores data objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, but does not replicate data as many times as in the standard S3. Nevertheless, RRS provides 400 times the durability of a typical hard disk drive, according to Amazon.

S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities. RRS, on the other hand, is designed for 99.99% durability and to sustain data loss in a single facility.

The new option is aimed at companies using S3 to share media content that's also stored elsewhere, or to store thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced, Amazon said. Customers with such data have asked for a lower-cost service than the standard S3.

"Reduced Redundancy Storage provides lower redundancy at a lower price, while still giving customers high availability," Alyssa Henry, general manager for S3, said in a statement.

Customers of RRS include Digitaria, which provide digital marketing services; and Razorfish, which offers large-scale online marketing campaigns.

"A key part of our digital distribution workflow is storing media transcodings, thumbnails, and other generated media assets on Amazon S3," Chuck Phillips, chief technology officer at Digitaria, said in a joint statement with Amazon. "We value cost savings more than the durability of this synthetic data which we can easily recreate if needed. RRS is a perfect solution."

Pricing for S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage starts at 10 cents per gigabyte and decreases as more data is stored.