Taking effect this month, Amazon will be lowering the prices for its Amazon S3 services. Depending on the amount of stored data, the price cuts are from 0 to 13.5 percent. S3 is Amazon’s online storage service, where the company virtualizes the storage and makes them available to customers through an API.

According to the company’s new tariffs, data stored up to 50 TB will see a 12 percent reduction in cost, and storage more than 500 TB will see a cost reduction of 13.5 percent. Amazon has cut the price from $0.14 per gigabyte per month to $0.125 for the first terabyte of data, and $0.110 per gigabyte per month for the next 49 TB, instead of the earlier $0.125.

The new price plan will be applicable only for US consumers. For other regions, Amazon has published a separate data storage outline.

On the company’s official blog, Jeff Barr, vice president of Amazon Web Services, said “there’s been a lot written lately about storage availability and prices. We’ve often talked about the benefits that AWS’s scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.”

Amazon explains that the decline in costs is due to the exponential growth of the Cloud. Last week, AWS made the astounding announcement that it had stored 762 billion objects in 2011.  That year the number of stored items increased by 192 percent, making it the largest annual increase since the creation of Amazon Web Services.

Last month, AWS launched AWS Cloud Gateway today, which connects on-premise software appliances with cloud-based storage.

Red Hat Storage Appliance for the Amazon Cloud

Not surprisingly, the Amazon Web Services ecosystem continues to grow.  Market leader in enterprise Linux, Red Hat, announced their Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services this week as well.  According to Red Hat, the new appliance will offer excellent performance by taking advantage of Amazon’s cloud services.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on EC2 and EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Thus, a NAS file server can be run directly into the cloud. According to Red Hat, this also means that all applications can be lifted with support of NAS storage without any adjustments to the cloud.

“Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud,” said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat. “Availability is a very important aspect of any storage system, irrespective of if it’s based in an enterprise’s own data center or in the cloud. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can do synchronous replication in one AWS region and multiple availability zones.”

The appliance is based on virtual storage appliance from Gluster, a company and product that Red Hat acquired in October last year. Red Hat plans to introduce the appliance in clouds from other providers in near future.