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Amazon has rolled out a persistent storage feature for its EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, which should allow developers to use its hosted computing services for a much broader range of applications.

The feature, called Elastic Block Store (EBS), allows developers to create a storage volume of between 1G byte and 1T byte and attach it to "instances" of applications running in Amazon's cloud. Developers can then detach the storage volume and use it later for other application instances and back it up to Amazon's S3 storage service if they need more durability.

The new feature also instantly makes EC2 more reliable, since the storage is now decoupled from the computing resources and is automatically replicated to prevent data loss if hardware fails. Amazon estimates EBS volumes will be 10 times more reliable than commodity hard drives.

Amazon believes that the EBS service will have particular appeal for customers looking to set up databases and those with applications that need access to block-level storage. "As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers," the company said.

EBS is priced at USD 0.10 per allocated gigabyte per month, plus USD 0.10 per 1 million I/O requests made to a volume. So, a 100G-byte Web site database averaging 100 I/O requests per second would cost USD 36 per month, Amazon said.



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