Perhaps feeling the increasing heat from competing online storage services, Amazon has announced a "Reduced Redundancy Storage" (RRS) option for its well-known Amazon Simple Storage Solution. The difference? The RSS option does not replicate (data) objects as many times as the regular S3 service, though it is nevertheless backed by Amazon's S3 service level agreement.

Alyssa Henry, General Manager for Amazon S3 explained that customers have asked Amazon for an even more cost-effective storage solution for data that can be easily reproducible. This could range from thumbnails, transcoded media or similar processed data where the standard level of reliability offered by Amazon S3 is not required.

"Reduced Redundancy Storage provides lower redundancy at a lower price, while still giving customers high availability," says Henry.

The Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% (that's nine 9s) durability, and can survive the concurrent loss of data in two separate facilities. In comparison, RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and is sufficiently robust to withstand the loss of data in a single facility. Comparatively, this level of data durability is loosely similar to that of a company that replicates its data at an offsite location.

The price for S3 RRS starts at just 10 cents per gigabyte--compared with the 15 cents per gigabyte of Amazon's regular storage. The price for both tiers decreases as more data is stored.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at InformationWeek
- check out the article at eWeek
- check out the article at MarketWatch

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