On the same day as Google announced that it is offering users the option of storing their data on fast solid-state drives (SSDs) rather than older, slower hard disks, Amazon has gone and pulled the same trick out of the bag by launching its General Purpose solid state drive option.
The new SSD-backed volume type for Amazon’s Elastic Block Store claims to be designed for five nines of availability (99.999%).
Amazon said that the SSD can be used for personal productivity, small to medium-sized databases, test and development environments, and boot volumes.
Amazon said: "General Purpose (SSD) volumes provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte."
Amazon will be charging customers only for the storage they provision, with no additional charges for I/O. Prices start at 10 cents per GB.
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