The service, which has already been tested in beta by web startups such as Flipboard, big data stalwarts such as NASA, and massive streaming media service Netflix — an Amazon competitor — is available today in limited preview. It’s designed for companies with datasets in the hundreds of gigabytes to the petabyte range, and it’s intended to reduce the price of big data warehousing and analysis by an order of magnitude.

“Enterprises are tired of paying such high prices for their data warehouses and smaller companies can’t afford to analyze the vast amount of data they collect (often throwing away 95% of their data),” Amazon’s VP of database services, Raju Gulabani said in a statement.

With RedShift, Amazon promises to reduce data storage costs below $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions, it says. Amazon’s talking about data warehousing companies such as Teradata, but also about its own solutions, saying that RedShift is just 10 percent of the cost of existing Amazon Web Services solutions.

On-demand pricing starts, Amazon announced, will start at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, which will scale linearly up to a petabyte. In other words, more data doesn’t mean a better deal. Customers who choose to purchase reserved instances to guarantee access get lower pricing: $0.228 per hour, which translates to under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

But it’s not just about the cost. It’s also about speed.

“Our internal tests have shown over 10 times performance improvement when compared to standard relational data warehouses.” Gulabani added. “Having the ability to quickly analyze petabytes of data at a low cost changes the game for our customers.”

Customers can buy in at the 2TB level — a single RedShift node — and scale up to one hundred 16TB nodes, a total of 1.6 petabytes. Amazon, of course, handles all provisioning, backup, and maintenance tasks. All data is continuously backed up to Amazon S3, the company said.

Amazon worked with data analytics technology company ParAccell to build the new solution. ParAccell enables high-performance analysis of massive datasets — more than a thousand JOINs in an SQL database, for example — and features real-time mid-query integration with Hadoop and other technologies.

It looks like the data storage and management industry just changed again.

Image credit: Star Wars

Birst, a Sequoia-backed business intelligence startup, rolled out a new feature today that targets data warehouses and makes potentially juicy data accessible to business users.

The new product, known as Distributed Business Analytics, combines structured data from data warehouses and any potentially useful departmental data (spreadsheets, lists and files) and stores it in one central place. Currently, companies have one data warehouse and dozens of departmental databases that remain independent of each other. The product, available in 30 days, promises to change that.

Peters told me he was inspired to start an analytics company when he realized that most valuable data doesn’t currently exist in the cloud but is stored on-premise, typically in a data warehouse. Peters told me that data will eventually move to the cloud, but we’re not there yet. He likens the process to jumping into a pool of icy water — “scary at first, but you get used to it.”

Business Intelligence has been accused of being bound by old technology. Companies are increasingly dedicated to the task of exploring the value in their unstructured data, such as emails, tweets, videos, and documents. When asked about innovation from Big Data startups like Datameer, he said: “Data isn’t useful until you can count it, graph it, structure it.”

BI vendors from Oracle to Qlikview will tell you that with their solution, companies can truly harness the power of their data. Birst’s CEO claims his solution is cheaper and more flexible than most; “overall it will probably cost you one-third less.”

This is the San Francisco-based company’s first major product update since nabbing $26 million in its fourth funding round.

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The Chicago-based startup’s technology breaks data apart and stores it in multiple locations.

That makes it cheaper and more secure than traditional data storage methods, Chris Gladwin, CEO and founder of Cleversafe, told VentureBeat, because it avoids duplication and offers clients the choice of warehousing  information within a corporate data center, across multiple data centers or in a storage cloud.

Cleversafe does this by dispersing data into slices and then spreading them across multiple storage nodes, usually three or four data centers. With each of these slices secure, the company then takes a defined threshold of slices that can be used to recreate the original data.

That approach avoids the usual practice of making multiple copies to protect against system failures. Multiple copies increase the security risk surrounding a piece of data, because the more copies are available, the more likely they are to be compromised.

Storing data this way is also much cheaper than traditional methods: Cleversafe said its clients see around a 50 to 70 percent reduction of storage resources once they switch to the company’s “dispersal” method.

“Cloud computing and cloud storage are hot within the technology sector,” said Gladwin. “Cleversafe was able to anticipate the trend six years ago, and this gave us the time to build the depth within our product to really address the market.”

Gladwin said the company would use the new funding to stimulate ongoing product development for the Cleversafe object storage platform and reach out to “mission-critical” sectors, such as the military, where keeping data completely safe is crucial.

“This investment gives us the capital necessary to deliver the promise of dispersed storage to the general market,” said Gladwin.

Today’s funding round follows closely on the heels of Cleversafe’s revelation on Monday that they had received an undisclosed amount of investment from In-Q-Tel, the investing arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. IQT has been investing heavily in tech security and venture capital funds that are familiar with Silicon Valley’s most-promising new tools.

The $31.4 million infusion announced today was lead by Motorola Ventures, early stage IT investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), OCA Ventures, and clients of Virginia-based investment placement firm Anderson & Strudwick.

The deal is still subject to Netezza shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM will pay $27 a share for the company, which closed at $24.60 a share on Friday.

Netezza provides analytics inside of a data warehousing appliance, which can handle complex analytic queries “10 to 100 times faster than traditional systems.” The deal is an extension of the companies’ existing partnership:

Today, Netezza designs and develops its appliances on IBM systems technology and combined with IBM software powers many applications within organizations.  The two companies have been strategic partners for many years focused on workload optimized systems that deliver integrated systems, software and storage for analyzing vast amounts of complex data.

The acquisition will bolster IBM’s own analytics offering — the company intends to integrate Netezza into its Information Management software portfolio.

Based in Marlborough, Mass., Netezza has around 500 employees worldwide. The company has raised $68 million since it was founded in 2000.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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