Amazon Redshift Deploys Affordable Cloud Solutions

AWS has released Amazon Redshift, a new data warehousing service, to provide more affordable and data-ready options to traditional enterprise data warehouses. Amazon Redshift was originally released in November, and is a cloud-based data warehousing solution, suitable for operating various kinds of data-intensive applications connected to the changing data trend.

AWS has stated that Redshift can analyze "virtually any size data set" via the SQL-based business intelligence tools like those from SAP and Informatica that are already utilized by some organizations. Higher performance rates are also possible thanks to dependence on columnar data storage and improved compression techniques.

The vice president of database services at AWS, Raju Gulabani, said: "When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at one-tenth the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,"

Customers like NASA and Netflix are testing the product, but SMBs (that may not be able to afford higher prices) are also being targeted by Redshift. Gulabani said: "With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology."

The director of systems and infrastructure at San Diego, California-based Digitaria (a partner of AWS), Kevin Chu, commented on the fact that Redshift is a strong AWS offering and is simple to distribute.

Chu stated: "I had a chance to meet with the AWS Database Services team during re:Invent when Redshift was first announced and in my opinion it is a great offering. As with most AWS services, it essentially removes the upfront CapEx of building a data warehousing environment and moves it to the cloud, freeing up IT resources. Users are able to continue using the business intelligence tools they have licensed and are comfortable with. We are currently identifying some opportunities that would benefit from Redshift."

Amazon Redshift is set to compete with companies like Oracle, IBM and HP, stating that despite their offerings of security and manageability, they are not flexible or cost effective. Redshift is now available in the U.S. East Coast, and will be released in other locations over the next few months. (CY) Link