Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering a feature to allow cloud users to move their storage volumes across AWS regions to create redundancy and improve disaster recovery.
Amazon cloud services are organized according to regions spread across the U.S., and customers had to, until now, pay for usage region by region.
"We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of a new feature Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshot Copy," the AWS blog announced. "EBS Snapshot Copy enables you to copy your EBS snapshots across AWS regions, thus making it easier for you to leverage multiple AWS regions and accelerate your geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery."
[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2012]
By offering free storage migration across regions, AWS appears to be responding to criticism over several cloud service outages this year.
On April 21, 2011, Amazon cloud services went down for several hours, and in some cases days, in its North Virginia data center.
Earlier this year, on June 14, a service disruption in Amazon's same Northern Virginia data centers stopped operations for about six hours, affecting scores of customers.
And on Oct. 22, Amazon Web Services went down again in its Northern Virginia market, causing website outages in an unknown number of companies.
Amazon said users will be charged only for the data transferred to copy the snapshot and to store the copied snapshot.
The company also said plans are underway to roll out Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy, which will allow users to copy both public and custom-created AMIs across regions.
PUBLISHED DEC. 19, 2012
