Amazon S3: 262 Billion Objects Now Stored

Amazon S3, the cloud storage service of Amazon Web Services, now stores about 262 billion objects, up about 100-fold over just four years ago.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Friday said in a blog post that growth in its cloud storage service has scaled sharply from four years ago, when in the fourth quarter of 2006 it stored a total of 2.9 billion objects.

That grew to 14 billion objects at the end of 2007, 40 billion objects in 2008 and 102 billion objects in 2009, wrote Jeff Barr, the lead Web services evangelist at Amazon.com, in that blog.

Barr also wrote that the peak request rate for Amazon S3 is now more than 200,000 requests per second.

Amazon claims that its Amazon S3 cloud storage service was designed to provide 99.999999999 percent durability and 99.99 percent availability of objects over a given year, and that it can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

That scalability has caught the attention of several storage vendors that use Amazon S3 as a cloud storage service for services they offer through solution providers.

StorSimple, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage vendor, offers a family of hybrid storage appliances that includes an iSCSI controller, local storage capacity on SSDs and SATA hard drives, and connection to a storage cloud including Amazon S3.

Nasuni, Natick, Mass., offers a cloud storage gateway that lets solution providers offer an interface to existing storage clouds including Amazon S3 that includes the key storage services, all for a monthly fee.

The data protection software of CommVault, Oceanport, N.J., can connect to cloud storage services including Amazon S3.

Other business and consumer services that use Amazon S3 include Dropbox, Zmanda, Ubuntu One and SmugMug, according to Web news blogging site WWWery.