Amazon Speeds Up Data Transfer For S3 Storage

Amazon Web Services, which had the online storage market largely to itself back in 2006 and 2007 but is seeing a lot of new competitors, is spiffing up the data transfer apparatus for its Simple Storage Service.

Amazon.com on 10 June launched AWS Import/Export for S3 to accelerate data transfers and migrations.

AWS Import/Export speeds up the process of “moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS by using portable storage devices for transport,” the company said. “For large data sets, AWS Import/Export is often significantly faster than [standard] Internet transfer and more cost-effective than upgrading” a network infrastructure.

Pay for what you use

Amazon.com recently lowered prices for its online backup service. Click here to read more.

“As with all AWS services, you pay only for the resources that you use. Pricing includes fees for each storage device used and for the number of hours it takes to load your data (data-loading-hours),” Amazon.com said in a description of the service.

EU pricing for AWS Import/Export is as follows. For device handling, $80 (£55) per storage device handled; for data loading, $2.49 per data-loading-hour (partial data-loading-hours being billed as full hours); and for data wiping, $2.49 (£1.70) per data-wiping-hour (partial data-wiping-hours being billed as full hours).

AWS “also announced support for Amazon S3 in the AWS Management Console. The AWS Management Console provides convenient management of your compute, storage and other AWS cloud resources through a simple point-and-click, web-based interface,” Amazon.com said. “Any Amazon S3 user can now easily create buckets, upload objects and set access controls, all from a browser” and without writing code.

For more information, go here.