Amazon Web Services With SSD-Based Nodes for Redshift

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (an Amazon.com company) announced the availability of Dense Compute nodes, an SSD-based node type, that enables customers to create faster, lower-cost data warehouses with Redshift.

Customers can start smaller, with 160GB datasets for as little as $0.10/hour, and then scale to a cluster with thousands of cores, terabytes of RAM, and hundreds of terabytes of SSD storage as their needs grow.

“Amazon Redshift has become the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS by providing customers with a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehousing service for a tenth the price of traditional solutions,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of database services, AWS. “We have been actively engaging with our customers using Amazon Redshift and watching them tap into insights that were previously out of reach to help grow their businesses. Today, we are making Amazon Redshift even more accessible to customers, lowering the cost of a single node by as much as 56% while increasing the ratio of CPU, RAM, and I/O to storage to offer even higher performance.“

Redshift customers have two node choices:

Dense Compute nodes and

Dense Storage nodes.

Dense Compute nodes are tailored for customers who have less than 500GB of data in their data warehouse or for customers with more than 500GB of data whose primary focus is performance. With this, customers can scale up to hundreds of terabytes, giving them the highest ratio of CPU, memory, and I/O to storage. If performance isn’t as critical for a customer’s use case, or if customers want to prioritize reducing costs further, they can use the larger Dense Storage nodes and scale up to a petabyte or more of compressed user data. Scaling a cluster up and down or switching between node types requires a single API call or a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.

Redshift lowers the cost of production and development by enabling customers to provision clusters in minutes, shut them down when not in use, and recreate them when they are needed again. Since its launch in February 2013, customers have created tens of thousands of development, test, and production data warehouses, and the service has been adopted by customers across a range of industries including advertising, financial services, manufacturing, media, healthcare, social media, mobile applications, and gaming. Today, customers such as Fender, Financial Times, MediaMath, Nasdaq OMX, Nokia, and Pinterest are using Redshift for a variety of analytic use cases, including enterprise data warehousing, customer lifetime value, clickstream, traffic, user engagement, and online advertising.

Pinterest, Inc. is a visual discovery tool where people pin the best ideas and plans to their own pinboards. “At Pinterest, we analyze tens of billions of objects, including pins, boards, and places, across our web and mobile properties to understand and optimize the Pinner experience for tens of millions of people around the world. Amazon Redshift has been a huge win. It’s made big data feel small and enabled our data science team to run the queries they need across a huge, rapidly growing data set. Amazon Redshift is easy to manage and with both the Dense Storage and Dense Compute node types, we know that regardless of our cost, storage, and performance needs, Amazon Redshift is up to the challenge,” said Mohammad Shahangian, data scientist, Pinterest.

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation is a guitar manufacturer. “We needed to extend our analytics to support our business, complex manufacturing, and distribution channels. We needed a solution we could implement quickly and scale with our data and end users, with minimal up-front investment. Amazon Redshift enabled us to start with the capacity we needed, taking the guesswork out of hardware capacity planning, while reducing our upfront costs with their pay-as-you-go model. Our Amazon Redshift Dense Storage cluster handled our demanding schema and queries with great performance,” said Michael Spandau, CIO, Fender Musical Instruments.

Customers can launch Redshift clusters using the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface.

Dense Compute and Dense Storage nodes for Amazon Redshift are available in: