This new service will allow companies who have systems in the AWS cloud to leverage a lower cost solution to store data that can easily be retrieved from another location or re-processed from source data.  You can now design your application to request data from S3 RRS, and if the data object does not exist, your application can retrieve it from another location or recreate the object (maybe from source data on the more resilient S3 storage).   This may be a great solution for companies that are using EC2 just for computing or processing large data sets, S3 RRS could reduce your monthly costs by quite a bit.

The only problem with this new storage service is that the cost is still pretty high for what you get.   Also, AWS did not decrease the cost for the data transfer to the RSS service (it’s the same as the standard S3), so they can potentially lose your data and the worst of it is you have to pay them to replace it.  But with a 99.99% reliability over the course of the year we’re probably not talking about a lot of data.

My company makes its living by storing an unlimited amount of our customers’ data indefinitely.  We can do this because we can leverage the highly resilient and low cost S3 storage to keep email, IM’s and social media messages on our system forever without making huge capital outlays in storage systems, colo’s, etc…   I think it’s great that AWS has brought in this lower tier of storage to differentiate itself with the other up and coming and established cloud computing providers by not forcing everyone to use the same “expensive” long term storage.  But for my money, it’s worth it to pay such a small amount more (5c per GB) for such a large improvement in resiliency.

Email is a management nightmare for companies.  People want to keep their emails forever, they don’t want mailbox quotas, and they have decided that email is the best place to store all their documents.   While working as a technology consultant, many people I spoke with wanted to outsource their email problem, and you see this as large organizations such as the City of LA move to Google Apps.   Now, most companies are not there yet when it comes to outsourcing all their email, but outsourcing archiving is something that many companies are steadily moving towards.  They don’t want to spend thousands on storage and servers for an archiving solution that is only used from time to time.  This is where Sonian comes in.  We can take your emails that you’ve been saving for 5 or 10 years, bring them in to our cloud based service and keep them securely, forever.  And no, we won’t charge you huge amounts to do this, just a simple flat monthly fee per user, per month.  We’ll also provide you a  web based interface to search and categorize your emails for compliance or investigatory reasons, and well as end user acesss.

So, it is a pretty exciting time here at Sonian, with almost 1900 customers in the past couple years we must on to something. And our explosive growth here only confirms that “The Cloud” is here, and people are ready to push their data up to it.