First unveiled in 2012, Amazon made petabyte-scale data warehouse service Amazon Redshift available to all Amazon Web Services customers in 2013. Last year, it got faster data nodes.

Now, Amazon has announced that it is making Dense Storage with Redshift faster and more cost-effective with a second-generation instance type, DS2. This has twice the memory and compute power of DS1, which was previously known as DW1, with the same amount of storage. DS2 also supports Enhanced Networking and offers 50% more disk throughput than DS1.

According to Amazon, DS2 also provides 50% better performance while maintaining the same pricing. Here’s a look at that, by the way:

“We expect existing DS1 customers to quickly adopt DS2. There’s really no reason not to,” says Amazon Web Services’ Tina Adams. “To move from DS1 to DS2, simply restore a DS2 cluster from a snapshot of a DS1 cluster of the same size. Restoring from snapshot is a push-button operation in our Console. Our streaming restore feature allows you to resume querying as soon as your new cluster is created, while data is streamed from S3 in the background. After the restore completes, if you’d like, you can resize your DS2 cluster with a few clicks.”

“You now have three Reserved Instance payment options!” Adams adds. “This gives you the flexibility to determine how much you wish to pay upfront. To purchase these offerings simply visit the Reserved Nodes tab in our Console.”

There are three options: No Upfront, Partial Upfront, and All Upfront. No Upfront means you don’t pay anything upfront, but commit to pay hourly over the course of a year at a 20% discount over On-Demand. The option is only available for a one-year term. Partial Upfront is the same as Redshift’s previous heavy utilization offering, in which you pay a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront and the rest over a one or three year term. The discount can be up to 41% for a year or 73% for three. All Upfront obviously means that you pay for the entire Reserved Instance term (1 or 3 years) at once upfront. It offers a discount of up to 42% for a year or 76% for three compared to On-Demand.

Adams says Amazon has more Redshift news on the way. Here’s a recent presentation from the company on how to build your own data warehouse with the product.

Images via Amazon