amazon AWS physical data ingest service launches
Not strictly on-topic for this blog but it is the main Amazon cloud feature that I've been anxiously awaiting for some time now.
Simply put, Amazon is now willing to accept delivery of eSATA and USB disks for large-scale data ingestion into the S3 storage cloud service. This is far faster than internet based methods, particularly if you are dealing with daily terabyte-scale data that you'd like to park in some sort of external utility service.
I think this may be a big deal for life science and can forsee quite a bit of scientific data making "1-way" trips into the cloud for long term storage and even secondary processing via cloud server instances. We'll see.
These links cover the just-launched service in detail:
XML Feeds