Amazon S3 for Science Grids: a Viable Solution?

Abstract

Amazon.com has introduced the Simple Storage Service (S3), a commodity-priced storage utility. S3 aims to provide storage as a low-cost, highly available service, with a simple 'pay-as-you-go' charging model. This article makes three contributions. First, we evaluate S3's ability to provide storage support to large-scale science projects from a cost, availability, and performance perspective. Second, we identify a set of additional functionalities that storage services targeting data-intensive science applications should support. Third, we propose unbundling the success metrics for storage utility performance as a solution, to reduce storage costs.