Amazon Web Services has announced the limited preview of Amazon Redshift, a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.
Redshift enables customers to increase the speed of query performance when analysing data sets, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools they use today. With a few clicks, customers can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabyte or more, for less than $1,000 per terabyte per year – one tenth of the price of most data warehousing solutions available.
Self-managed, on-premise data warehouses require significant time and resource to administer, especially for large datasets. Loading, monitoring, tuning, taking backups, and recovering from faults are complex and time-consuming tasks.
Traditionally, the financial cost associated with building, maintaining and growing traditional data warehouses is expensive. Larger companies have resigned themselves to paying such a high cost for data warehousing, while smaller companies often find the hardware and software costs prohibitively expensive, leaving most of these organisations without a data warehousing capability. Amazon Redshift aims to change this.
