In an earlier post on is Amazon EC2 right for SAAS, I wrote briefly on whether it would be possible to have proprietary database files in Amazon S3. Based on a recent announcement by EnterpriseDB and further research, I came across Elastra a company, if I understand correctly, provides some kind of a storage virtualization service on top of Amazon S3. See their architecture**.
This is cool technology because, in addition to having elastic compute cloud, it now becomes possible to have elastic database storage cloud. The key is, “database storage” and not ordinary key-value storage that the regular S3 is supposed to be.
Elastra currently has support for MySQL and PostreSQL, the two most popular open-source databases. With this technology, all of a sudden a large-scale database deployment is available to startups as a utility (or as some are calling it as PAAS, platform as a service).
What does it mean to the big players in the database space, mainly Oracle, IBM and Microsoft? Since Amazon EC2 platform is Linux based, Oracle and IBM should be able to soon roll out their own database PAAS on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Microsoft probably need to figure out how it can enter into this space, especially if they end up acquiring Yahoo!, they would have to deal with a lot of BSD infrastructure as well!
**These guys are using javascript and ajax to load their various tab pages making it difficult to directly link to their technology page. Sometimes, in the effort to make things cool, website developers don’t realize how that impacts their SEO effort, but that’s a different thing. So, if I can’t directly link to their technology page, the next best thing is to hot-link to the architecture diagram but I didn’t want to hot-link either. So, the 2nd next best thing is to link to their image!
poeticcode 
