Amazon Web Services Opens New U.S. Datacenter

Amazon Web Services has opened its seventh global datacenter and its second on the west coast of the United States. The new facility in Oregon offers a lower-cost alternative to the cloud computing provider's Northern California location.

Like Amazon's other datacenters throughout the world, the Oregon facility will offer multiple Availability Zones, Amazon said on Wednesday. The addition of another datacenter should appeal to customers who want further redundancy, an issue that has come up more after the spate of Amazon outages this year.

Nevertheless, the company is emphasizing that the new Oregon datacenter has lower usage fees than its location in Northern California, on the order of about 10 percent.

"Launching this new lower-priced U.S. West Region today is another example of our commitment to driving down costs for our customers," said Amazon senior VP Andy Jassy in a statement. "Now developers and businesses with operations or end users near the west coast of the United States can use our U.S. West Infrastructure at an even lower cost than they could before."

While it's true that Amazon has frequently reduced its fees, the prices associated with the Oregon facility is the same as its East Coast datacenter in Virginia, Amazon said.

The new datacenter offers the portfolio of Amazon's cloud offerings, including Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), a variety of database services, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Elastic Load Balancing (EBS).

Among those services not yet available in Oregon are Premium Support, HPC, CloudFront, ElastiCache, Beanstalk, Simple Email Service, Route 53, Direct Connect and Import/Export services, noted Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf in a Tweet. "If AWS follows past trends, these missing services will show up in Oregon over coming days/weeks/months," Hilgendorf added.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 10, 2011 at 11:59 AM