Amazon Launches Low-Cost Data Archival Storage Service, One Penny For 1 GB of Storage Per Month

This new service comes from Amazon Web Services and is named Glacier.
It might be of interest to some of you who have an interest/need for off-site storage of data.
At the bottom of this post you’ll find a link to a few common use studies for the service including archiving research and scientific data and digital preservation.
From the AWS Blog Post:

With Glacier, you can store any amount of data with high durability at a cost that will allow you to get rid of your tape libraries and robots and all the operational complexity and overhead that have been part and parcel of data archiving for decades.
Glacier provides – at a cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte, per month – extremely low cost archive storage. 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.

Differences between Glacier and other data storage services (including Amazon’s S3)?

First, S3 is optimized for rapid retrieval (generally tens to hundreds of milliseconds per request). Glacier is not (we didn’t call it Glacier for nothing). With Glacier, your retrieval requests are queued up and honored at a somewhat leisurely pace. Your archive will be available for downloading in 3 to 5 hours.
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Retrieval requests are priced differently, too.  You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage, pro-rated daily, for free each month. Beyond that, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per Gigabyte (see the pricing page for details).  So for data that you’ll need to retrieve in greater volume more frequently, S3 may be a more cost-effective service.
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Glacier is available for use today in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) Regions.

Much More About the Glacier in the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Glacier Home Page and Glacier Introduction
Finally, the Glacier website also offers several common use cases.

Coverage

• Amazon Web Services launches low-cost storage service (via Computerworld)
• Amazon Launches Glacier Cloud Storage Service (via PC Mag)
• Amazon Announces A New Dirt Cheap Cloud For Storag (via BI)

Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, Libraries, Preservation