Faster & More Cost-Effective SSD-Based Nodes for Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift provides customers with fast, fully managed, SQL-based data warehousing in the AWS Cloud at a tenth the price of traditional solutions. In previous blog posts, weve talked about Redshifts launch, global expansion, and new features.

Today we are making Redshift faster and more cost-effective by adding Dense Compute Nodes. This new SSD-based storage option is available in two sizes:

• Large – 160 GB of SSD storage, 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670v2 virtual cores, and 15 GiB of RAM.
• Eight Extra Large – 2.56 TB of SSD storage, 32 Intel Xeon E5-2670v2 virtual cores, and 244 GiB of RAM.

The Dense Compute nodes feature a high ratio of CPU power, RAM, and I/O performance to storage, making them ideal hosts for data warehouses where high performance is essential. You can start small, with a single Large node for $0.25/hour, and scale all the way up to a cluster with thousands of cores, terabytes of RAM, and hundreds of terabytes of SSD storage.

If you have less than 500 GB of compressed data, your lowest cost and highest performance option is Dense Compute. Above that, if you care primarily about performance, you can stay with Dense Compute and scale all the way up to clusters with thousands of cores, terabytes of RAM and hundreds of terabytes of SSD storage. Or, at any point, you can use switch over to our existing Dense Storage nodes that scale from terabytes to petabytes for little as $1,000 / TB / Year. Amazon Redshifts resize feature lets you easily change node types or cluster sizes with a few clicks in the Console:

All of the features that have made Redshift such a big hit are available on the Dense Compute nodes including fast provisioning, automatic patching, continuous backups to Amazon S3, fast restores, failure handling, cross-region disaster recovery, and encryption of data at rest and in transit.

On-Demand prices for a single Large Dense Compute node start at just $0.25 per hour in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region; this drops down to an effective price of $0.10 (ten cents!) per hour with a Three Year Reserved Instance. Like the Dense Storage nodes, the new Dense Compute nodes are available in the following AWS Regions:

• US East (Northern Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• EU (Ireland)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)

The new nodes are available today and you can use them to create your data warehouse now!

— Jeff;