Amazon Glacier: Extremely low cost and secure backup

Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced Amazon Glacier – a secure, reliable and 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 database 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/month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To learn more about Amazon Glacier, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glacier.

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.

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 99.999999999% 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.

“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.”