Amazon: Persistent storage open for EC2

Amazon said Thursday that its Elastic Block Store feature is now available to all of its EC2 Web service customers. The move gives Amazon Web Services a full storage suite delivered as a service.

EC2 is Amazon's storage service and the Elastic Block Store gives customers a "persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach to a running instance of EC2," according to Amazon's blog. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said "with the launch of the Elastic Block Store we complete an important milestone in offering a complete suite of storage solutions as part of the Amazon Infrastructure Services." Vogels also details the architecture more in a blog post.

The Elastic Block Store (EBS) was in the alpha release stage, but is now open to all. EBS volumes, which range from 1 GB to 1TB, can be mounted as a file system or as raw storage. EBS is also more database friendly to appeal to more enterprises.

In a statement, Amazon explained:

Prior to Amazon EBS, storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can choose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.