Amazon launches cheap archival storage service

BANGALORE, INDIA: Online retail major Amazon announced a new data back-up and archival storage, Amazon Glacier, at 'extremely low cost'.

According to the company, its new Glacier service can solve the problem of organizations that 'spend a lot of time and a lot of money archiving mission-critical data' residing inside disk, optical media or tape-based storage devices.

"With Glacier, companies can store any amount of data with high durability at a cost that will allow them to get rid of tape libraries and robots and all the operational complexity and overhead that have been part and parcel of data archiving for decades," wrote Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels on Amazon Web Services Blog.

Built on its S3 platform, the new Glacier can provide storage service at a cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte, per month.

"You can store a little bit, or you can store a lot (Terabytes, Petabytes, and beyond). There's no upfront fee and you pay only for the storage that you use. You don't have to worry about capacity planning and you will never run out of storage space. Glacier removes the problems associated with under or over-provisioning archival storage, maintaining geographically distinct facilities and verifying hardware or data integrity, irrespective of the length of your retention periods," he adds.

Glacier is available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) Regions.

Users can access it from the AWS Management Console or through the Glacier APIs. AWS has added Glacier support to the AWS SDKs.