Amazon Glacier Launched For Long Term Cloud Storage

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Glacier – a low cost storage solution for data archiving and backup.

The Glacier can keep large or small amounts of data in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month. Amazon claims that despite the low price point, the storage platform remains secure, reliable and simple to operate.

Data freezer

Glacier was designed specifically for data that doesn’t need to be frequently accessed, but is still important to retain for future reference. This category would include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.

According to Amazon, the system delivers average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent. Glacier automatically replicates all data across multiple facilities and performs ongoing data integrity checks, using redundant data to make automatic repairs if any faults are discovered.

The main selling point of the Glacier is it beats any on-premise storage solution in terms of price. Companies usually have to pay upfront for their archiving solutions, while guessing what their capacity requirements might be. In contrast, Glacier is scalable, and uses a Pay-As-You-Go model. In short, customers won’t ever have to pay for the capacity they don’t use.

However, low price also means that when customers want to access their data, they might have to wait several hours for retrieval.

“Every day our genome sequencers produce terabytes of data,” said Keith Raffel, senior VP and chief commercial officer of Complete Genomics, a company which provides human genome sequencing and analysis as a service to academic and biopharmaceutical researchers.

“As our company moves into the clinical space, we face a legal requirement to archive patient data for years that would drastically raise the cost of storage.  Thanks to Amazon Glacier’s secure and scalable solution, we will be able to provide cost-effective, long-term storage and thereby eliminate a barrier to providing whole genome sequencing for medical treatment of cancer and other genetic diseases.”

“Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution,” commented Alyssa Henry, VP of AWS Storage Services.  “This approach requires expensive upfront payments, is difficult to operate and maintain, and leads to wasted capacity and money.”

“Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well.”

Amazon Glacier is now available for European customers, with services running from data centres in Ireland.

Earlier this month, Rackspace had launched its OpenStack cloud services in Europe to compete with AWS.

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