Amazon has launched a new service for the digital equivalents of wedding dresses and high school yearbooks -- stuff you need to hang on to, but don't need to keep close by.
The company today launched Amazon Glacier, an archival storage service priced as low as one penny per GB per month. The service is designed to simplify and reduce the expense of archiving data, for which enterprises spend time and money on disk, optical media, and tape, requiring hardware maintenance, planning, negotiating with vendors, and managing facilities, according to an Amazon blog.
The capacity is "Terabytes, Petabytes, and beyond," with no upfront fee, and fees only for what's used, Amazon says.
Glacier differs from Amazon S3, its previous cloud storage service, in two respects: First, S3 is optimized for rapid retrieval, generally tens or hundreds of milliseconds per request. "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," Amazon says. Users can retrieve up to 5 percent of their average monthly storage, pro-rated daily, for free each month. Beyond that, the retrieval fee is $0.10 per gigabyte. "So for data that you'll need to retrieve in greater volume more frequently, S3 may be a more cost-effective service," Amazon says.
Also, while S3 allows users to pick their own names for objects, Glacier assigns its own unique ID.
Amazon gave several examples of how Glacier might be used: Enterprise IT might use it to store email, corporate file shares, legal records, and business documents that need to be stored for years or decades with little or no reason to access it. Users in digital media can use it to archive books, movies, images, music, news footage, and more -- content that requires a great deal of storage and little access. And Glacier can be used to store scientific or research data.
Glacier, available now, will be helpful to businesses in legal, healthcare, education, and other industries with regulatory requirements for long-term archiving large volumes of data. At the same time, enterprises need to consult with their legal and regulatory officers to ensure that Glacier complies with regulations.
Amazon will have to convince enterprises that its cloud storage is reliable, which might be difficult in light of a recent outage that took down popular services including Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
To start using Glacier, users create a named vault, with up to 1,000 vaults per region in an Amazon Web Services account. Uploaded data is called an "archive," and each archive can be up to 40 terabytes. Amazon encrypts data using AES–256. The annual durability -- or error prevention rate, to stop lost or corrupted data -- is 99.999999999 percent per archive, with integrity checks and self-healing permitting the concurrent loss of data in two facilities without losing any customer data.
Amazon explains Glacier in this video:
What do you think? Can Amazon be trusted with archival data?
My main concern would be to ensure that the contract shifts all liability to Amazon should records I'm retaining for regulatory (or litigation) reasons prove impossible to recover. Penalties for failing to retain records can be steep.
Wired's Klint Finley initially expresses concern that the pricing structure could contain hidden charges that will run up a big cost for anybody who actually retrieves the data. Later, Amazon corrects that notion, but he's still concerned that an accidental coding error could prove costly.
kq4ym - It's slow by design. It's not designed to be used for materials you need frequent or rapid access too. It's for materials you almost certainly will never need to look at again, but need to hang on to just to be sure. I think the best example is materials that companies are required to hang on to for regulatory reasons, but never actually look at.
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