Amazon Offers Unlimited Online Storage

By Greg McNevin

March 22nd, 2006: There may be rumours of Google offering unlimited online storage, however Amazon has jumped in ahead of the search giant and released a service promising just that.

Amazon has announced that it will be diversifying its business and IT infrastructure by renting out storage space to independent storage and software developers.

Called Amazon S3, the service will cost US$0.15 per Gb of month for storage and US$0.20 per Gb for data transferred. This could prove a boon for storage hungry organisations that are unable to shoulder the costs associated with setting up and running their own Storage Area Network (SAN).

Amazon says it is offering everyone from students to developers access to “the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”

Amazon S3 allows files of up to five Gb each to be stored and retrieved at will via a HTTP or BitTorrent protocol.

Even without Google’s rumoured storage aspirations, there are a number of companies in the online storage game now, leaving some analysts such as Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink LLC in the U.S. thinking that Amazon is stretching itself a little thin.

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