Amazon.com unveils data storage service

20.03.2006
With its e-business credentials firmly established, online retailer Amazon.com Inc. last week unveiled a new service through which it leverages its massive IT infrastructure by leasing storage capacity to independent and corporate software developers.

The Seattle-based company's Web services division unveiled the Amazon S3 service to sell excess storage capacity on Amazon's IT systems for 15 cents per gigabyte per month for storage, plus 20 cents per gigabyte for data transfer.

The Stardust@home space science project at the University of California, Berkeley, a test site for Amazon S3, is using the service to store some 60 million photographs of interstellar space dust collected by NASA's Stardust space probes.

Bryan Mendez, an astronomer at Berkeley, said project officials decided to use Amazon S3 a few months ago because it would have been too expensive to purchase short-term storage just for the experiment. "It would be more than we need for this one-time shot," Mendez said.

The millions of photographs are nearly ready for a review by volunteers looking for visible "tracks" of particles collected by the probe before the images are passed on to scientists.

Analysts were unsure about whether Amazon.com's service can be successful.