[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company has released a limited preview of Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year – one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions currently in the market. Amazon Redshift manages all of the work needed to set up, operate, and scale a data warehouse, from provisioning capacity to monitoring and backing up the cluster, to applying patches and upgrades.

Amazon says it uses a number of techniques, including columnar data storage, advanced compression, and high performance IO and network, to achieve significantly higher performance than traditional databases for data warehousing and analytics workloads. By distributing and parallelizing queries across a cluster of inexpensive nodes, Amazon Redshift makes it easier to obtain high performance without requiring customers to hand-tune queries, maintain indices, or pre-compute results.

Amazon Redshift is certified by popular business intelligence tools, including Jaspersoft and MicroStrategy. Over twenty customers, including Flipboard, NASA/JPL, Netflix, and Schumacher Group, are in the Amazon Redshift private beta program.

Amazon Redshift includes technology components licensed from ParAccel and is available with two underlying node types, including either 2 terabytes or 16 terabytes of compressed customer data per node. One cluster can scale up to 100 nodes and on-demand pricing starts at just $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, scaling linearly up to a petabyte and more. Reserved instance pricing lowers the effective price to $0.228 per hour or under $1,000 per terabyte per year.