Cloud services provider Amazon announced on Tuesday that it has launched Glacier archive cloud storage. The hardware-agnostic service aims to replace tape-based archival storage.
Glacier is priced lower than Amazon S3, at $0.01 per gigabyte, per month, and like other Amazon services it is pay as you go.
While S3 is optimized for rapid retrieval, Glacier is not, AWS senior evangelist Jeff Barr explains in a blog post on Tuesday. With Glacier, archives will be available for downloading in 3 to 5 hours. The other major difference between S3 and Glacier is S3 allows users to assign names to each object, while Glacier assigns a unique id to each archive at upload time in order to keep costs as low as possible.
Breaking up archive storage from other cloud storage is an interesting idea, and one that other cloud providers may want to mimic since the focus isn’t on speed, but the low cost. Of course, with customers storing documents like email, corporate file shares and business documents, the focus should also be on security, which can be a hard sell for some enterprise customers. Recently, the WHIR talked to SoftLayer about how it wins cloud hosting customers from Amazon.
“Retrieval requests are priced differently, too. You can retrieve up to 5 percent of your average monthly storage, pro-rated daily, for free each month,” Barr said. “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.”
Glacier is available in the US-East, US-West, Asia-Pacific and EU-West regions, and can be accessed from the AWS Management Console.
Talk back: What are your thoughts on Glacier? Do you think the low cost will be a selling point for AWS Glacier? Let us know in a comment.
Related posts:
- Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services
- The Open Group Publishes Standards for SOA and Cloud Computing
Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/amazon-web-services-launches-glacier-archive-cloud-storage
No comments:
Post a Comment