Amazon has announced Amazon Glacier – a secure, reliable and extremely low cost storage solution designed for data archiving and backup. Amazon Glacier is designed for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference. Examples include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data,long-term data base backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably and durably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First,they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution. Second,since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be,they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments, all ongoing operational expenses are included, and businesses can elastically and quickly scale their usage up or down when needed.
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 99.99% 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.
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.
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services, now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon’s expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost.
