Amazon Tuesday announced the launch of Amazon Glacier, a cloud storage services that aims to bring the security and reliability of Amazon Web Services to the online storage space. Amazon Glacier offers storage at just $0.01 per GB per month, with all data transfers in to the service (uploads by the user), completely free of charge.
Data transfers out of the service (downloads or retrievals by the user) are free up to 1 GB per month, but charged starting $0.120 per GB after that (pricing varies depending upon which data centre, called 'Region' by Amazon, you choose). With the pricing structure, Amazon expects Glacier to be used for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference (think backups!).
Amazon Glacier sample use-cases include digital media archives (cheap online backup for your photos/ videos), financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. Since Amazon Glacier does not include any up-front payments or monthly commitments, and it offers the ability to scale-up/ down on-the-go, Amazon hopes to position Glacier as the ideal platform for enterprise backup needs.
Amazon Glacier allows customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, removing the need for hardware provisioning, data replication across multiple facilities, or hardware failure detection and repair. Designed to deliver average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored, the service automatically replicates all data across multiple facilities and performs ongoing data integrity checks, using redundant data to perform automatic repairs if hardware failure or data corruption is discovered. Data uploaded to Amazon Glacier remains safely stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers.
It is worth noting that typical end-users can't directly start using Amazon Glacier. They must wait until their favourite backup/ file-transfer application adds Amazon Glacier support. The enterprising can use the Amazon Glacier API to build their own solutions.
Amazon Glacier is available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) Regions. For complete pricing details, visit the Amazon Glacier
website.