Amazon’s New Storage Snapshot Feature Has Several Uses
David Linthicum- Wednesday, December 19, 2012
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Amazon announced the EBS Snapshot Copy feature this week. This new feature provides AWS users with the ability to move EBS storage volumes between Amazon’s regions.
Hmmm, what can we do with that?
Barb Darrow correctly points out that disaster recovery is a killer application for Snapshot. “It should come as especially good news for AWS customers shanghaied by snafus earlier this year at Amazon’s big US-East data center complex.”
Now, in theory, if customers spread data volumes across regions it will be less risky since outages typically won’t occur in more than one geographical region. This is an approach that most enterprises have been taking for years, as they did routine disaster planning.
However, there are other uses as well. Think about the ability to version information over a period of time, and the ability to deal with compliance requirements that ask you to copy your data for auditing purposes. Of course, you can do this internal to the region, but this approach allows you to kill two birds with one stone.
