The New York Times (NYT) has had an interesting project just complete.

They decided to make all their public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge.

These articles are all in the form of images scanned from original editions of the paper.

To do this they had to upload the scanned images of the 11 million articles up to Amazon S3. That was about 4 TB (Terabytes)

Then they used Amazon’s E2 “rent some seriously powerful servers” service to create PDF files of the 11 million articles using a combination of specially written software.

If you are familiar with Amazon’s E2 service you might like to know it took 24 hours using 100 Es instances to create the 11 million PDF’s.

When finished, the 11 million articles generated 1.5TB of data to store in Amazon S3.

And that’s were it now sit’s waiting to be searched by anybody via the main NYT website at http://www.nytimes.com

Just look for the Search Box and select:  NYT Archive 1851 - 1980 from the drop down list!

…yet another great example of using the power of Amazon S3 in business!

Have you got your software to start using Amazon S3 yet?

Visit: http://www.databucketpro.com

Regards

Marc Liron - Microsoft MVP

The Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement came into being on October 1st 2007.

Just like any other company that provides network storage, Amazon Web Services has now provided a Service Level Agreement for its paying customers.

Amazon Web Services will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle.

In the event Amazon S3 does not meet the Service Commitment to its customers they will be eligible to receive a Service Credit.

The team behind the announcement had this to say:

“This SLA has been in the works for a while and we take the commitments made in this document quite seriously. We knew that S3 had to meet the very high performance and reliability goals set by our internal clients. We strongly believed that meeting this level of operational excellence would be good enough for our external users as well. Before we published our SLA, we wanted to get a better sense of how our external developers were making use of S3. With well over 5 billion objects under management, we now understand the usage patterns and properties needed to make an informed commitment.”

They then go on to say:

“We’re committed to providing a highly available service which meets the needs of current and future customers. This new SLA is our way of formalizing that commitment, letting you know what the minimum expected level of performance will be.”

Well that’s GOOD NEWS for customers!

Have you got your software to start using Amazon S3 yet?
Visit: http://www.databucketpro.com

Regards

Marc Liron - Microsoft MVP
http://www.marcliron.com

In March 2006 Amazon launched its Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service - that’s where the 3 comes from) online storage web service, offered by its Amazon Web Services section.

Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Data can be easily stored and retrieved at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon charges in proportion to the amount of data stored and applies charges for sending and receiving data. So this can, in many cases, be a much better investment that traditional web hosting.

Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network.

So even a small business can have the same file hosting and backup service as the major players!

Amazon S3 is currently being used by small start-ups and enterprise clients as a web hosting service, image hosting service, back-up system, and more.

Amazon S3 clients even include Microsoft!

…and soon YOU CAN TOO using Data Bucket PRO - a simple way to use Amazon S3 for the non technical user.

The main attractiveness of Amazon S3 is its design which provides scalability, high availability, and a low latency at very low costs.

Regards

Marc Liron - Microsoft MVP
http://www.databucketpro.com

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