Amazon announced its Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) tier last week and storage blogs blew up with the news, touting the drop in pricing as a major development. The new tier reduces the cost of storing objects in the cloud from 15 cents per GB to 10 cents per GB and below.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains the new offering in detail here and here, but the basic idea is that customers will pay less because Amazon will store fewer copies of their data in the cloud. The key here is the word “fewer.” Amazon isn’t saying it will only keep one copy. This is about delivering lower levels of redundancy. But what we found to be really interesting about this announcement is the fact that Amazon’s reduced version still includes two copies.
From a competitive standpoint, this amounts to a shot over the bow. Typically, cloud vendors are fairly tight-lipped on the subject of redundancy, but in some cases, one copy is the starting point. At least one provider charges extra for each extra copy stored in the cloud. What Amazon is saying with this announcement is that even its reduced redundancy tier is more than the minimum offered by some others in the space.
These providers are charging more for a level that Amazon is dropping down to.
Obviously it’s hard to say what will come of this development, but we would love to see this kind of transparency from more storage providers. We want to know exactly how many copies of each object are stored in the cloud and how those copies are protected. Price per GB, after all, is only part of the equation. You need to factor in performance, reliability, and redundancy, too, before comparing. Yet those metrics are hard to come by.
Consider protection. Putting copies of your data in two different data centers is a great first step. But ideally we’d like to be assured that those copies are sitting on top of another level of redundancy, such as RAID 5 or RAID 1, that further protects them within that site. This is the minimum – ideally the vendors would create even more copies.
Storage Soup suggested that we are going to join the rush to support this new tier, but that probably won’t happen. For one, we don’t rush. But there is another reason. Amazon points out that RRS will deliver 99.99% durability, which translates to one object lost per year for every 10,000 stored. Apparently this is good enough for some of its customers, which is why they offered the new service in the first place, but from a file sytem standpoint, it falls short. What if that one lost item was a root directory entry? If that disappeared, you wouldn’t be able to get through to the folders beneath it. When we push data to the cloud, we expect to get it back when needed.
This new Amazon tier, along with Google’s announcement last week, is great news for cloud storage. Prices may very well continue to drop. But we’d like to see the competition over protection heat up a few degrees, too.
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