Web 2.0 Explorer

Amazon has released some details about uptake Is Amazon the India of online storage outsourcing? of its S3 service. S3 customers range from Microsoft to SmugMug - they're all using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for cheap, reliable web-scale storage. Together S3's early customers are storing more than 800 million data objects using Amazon S3. It costs $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred to use S3.

According to an email I received from an Amazon PR person, Microsoft is using S3 "to dramatically reduce its storage costs without compromising scale or reliability." Smaller businesses, such as SmugMug, are "depending on the S3 benefits of scale and cost-efficiently previously only available to large companies." Altexa, Amazon.com, Elephant Drive, Jungle Disk, LA NACION, MediaSilo are other companies using S3 for their online storage needs.

From the press release, here's how Microsoft is using S3:

"Nearly 7,000 miles away in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft wanted to expand its MSDN Direct Student Download program. "We needed a storage and delivery solution that made it simple, fast, and dependable for students in hundreds of countries around the world to download our software at any time," said Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives in the Developer Marketing division at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft wanted to scale the program up without any upfront or increased ongoing expenses, which is why it chose Amazon S3. Microsoft expanded the program while managing to cut storage costs by more than 90 percent since switching to Amazon S3. "In addition to being easy for our users, Amazon S3 allows us to deploy and scale up in a very cost-efficient manner," said Wilson."
(emphasis mine)

At first I wondered if Microsoft's use of Amazon S3 is more a publicity thing than anything else. Surely Microsoft of all companies has sufficient in-house online storage? But I guess it's the same argument as outsourcing IT workers - if it's cheaper to outsource online storage to Amazon without losing anything in quality, then it makes commercial sense to do it. So does this mean Amazon is the India of online storage? (joke)