Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Glacier: Low Cost Archive Storage

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Just announced Amazon Web Services has launched a new storage product called Amazon Glacier. Amazon Glacier provides secure and durable storage for archiving your data and backup at a extremely low cost.

To keep the cost down, Amazon Glacier is designed “for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference.”

Amazon Glacier customers will be able to store as small or as large amounts of data at a very low price as low as $0.01/GB per month. One good thing is there is no upfront cost and included in the price is all ongoing operational expenses. You pay only for what you use.

Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Glacier: Low Cost Archive Storage

Companies typically over-pay for data archiving. First, they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance).

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. [Via Amazon]

According to Alyssa Henry, Vice President of AWS ….

“Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution,” said Alyssa Henry, Vice President 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 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 http://aws.amazon.com/glacier.