Amazon Web Services, Inc. has announced that Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, is now broadly available for use. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch an Amazon Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabyte or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte per year. Since Amazon Redshift was announced at the AWS re: Invent conference in November 2012, customers using the service during the limited preview have ranged from startups to global enterprises, with datasets from terabytes to petabytes, across industries including social, gaming, mobile, advertising, manufacturing, health care, e-commerce, and financial services. To get started with Amazon Redshift, visit http://aws.amazon.com/redshift.

Traditional data warehouses require significant time and resource to administer. In addition, the financial cost associated with building, maintaining, and growing self-managed, on-premise data warehouses is very high. Amazon Redshift not only significantly lowers the cost of a data warehouse, but also makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data very quickly. With Amazon Redshift, customers can dramatically increase query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools they use today. Amazon Redshift uses a number of techniques, including columnar data storage, advanced compression, and high performance IO and network, to achieve significantly higher performance than traditional databases for data warehousing and analytics workloads. Amazon Redshift is fully managed, automating all the common tasks associated with provisioning, configuring, monitoring, backing up, scaling, and securing a data warehouse. Amazon Redshift is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and will be rolled out to other AWS Regions in the coming months.

“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of database services, Amazon Web Services. “With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology. We are delighted by the excitement from our preview customers as they’ve experienced the performance improvement and lower costs that Amazon Redshift delivers.”