Matthew Lanham

At the moment, as many of you who have looked into Amazon EC2 will know, when the instance crashes or is restarted the data stored within that instance is re-set….a real problem if you do not have a great backup strategy, however Amazon have now announced yet another great product that will help solve this issue…

This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.

You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.

This is fantastic and i have signed up for the beta, however not had acceptance yet

Right Scale have written an excellent article on it here:

Amazon takes EC2 to the next level with persistent storage volumes

Amazons example of usage and commands