Amazon recently launched various ways to store and access data through its Redshift data warehouse. Blocks & Files reported that the Redshift warehouse now offers new options for storage and access including caching, tiering and federated queries. The announcement was released at the recently concluded re: Invent in Las Vegas.
This upgrade came in light of the increase of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers storing more data into their server at faster speeds and lower expenses.
The warehouse, called Redshift Managed Storage, “is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud,” according to the AWS website. This service allows users to avail only a few hundred gigabytes of data, with the option to get more.
The scalable system “uses large, high-performance SSDs in each Redshift RA3 instance for fast local storing and Amazon S3 for longer-term durable storage.” Blocks & Files also noted that Redshift Managed Storage “automatically offloads” data to S3. This combination enables the company to offer more efficient and safe storing services.
Existing customers using current offerings will be able to enjoy faster speeds and capacity without adding to their expenses. The report said that Dense Storage (DS2) customers can anticipate a 100% increase in performance and capacity.
Meanwhile, RA3 16xlarge users can expect to get support for workloads amounting to petabytes (PB) up to 8PB. For comparison, an average computer usually has 1 terabyte of data storage, which is equal to 1,000 gigabytes. One PB equals 1,024 TBs.
RA4 4lxlarge is expected to be released early in 2020.
Contributing to this development is AWS’ Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUA) technology. TechCrunch described AQUA as a “hardware-accelerated cache” which offers up to ten times the speed of query performance compared to its competitors.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that AQUA will minimize future problems in terms of transfer speed and space. He clarified that this is possible by bringing the computing power needed directly to the storage layer. TechCrunch explained that “the cache sits on top of Amazon’s standard S3 service and can hence scale-out as needed across as many nodes as needed.”
AQUA is 100% compatible with the current update on Redshift, making it easier to integrate and use.
Other services that have become available with AWS’ rollout of new options include RA3 instance, Redshift Data Lake Export, Redshift Federated Query, Amazon Managed (Apache) Cassandra Service, and UltraWarm.
