It looks like Amazon is becoming the best answer around for hosting. Want simple storage? There's S3. Want a simple database? There's SimpleDB. Need a virtual box in the cloud? There's EC2. Now, they've completed the circle with Elastic Block Storage:

Amazon EBS will be offered in the form of storage volumes which you can mount into your EC2 instance as a raw block storage device. It basically looks like an unformatted hard disk. Once you have the volume mounted for the first time you can format it with any file system you want or if you have advanced applications such as high-end database engines, you could use it directly.

That's pretty cool. What it means is that you can now deploy a web app - like, say, Web Velocity - onto EC2, and have your RDBMS out there with it. IMHO, this is game changing - your local IT group has virtually no reason to run stuff in house anymore.

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