Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Glacier

On Tuesday Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a new storage solution designed for archiving and backing up data that's infrequently used but still needed for future reference.

Called Amazon Glacier, the new service replaces the typical tape-based solution, hoarding long-term data like digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.

"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."

Amazon said that Amazon Glacier doesn't require the upfront capital commitments seen with other storage solutions, as all ongoing operational expenses are included, allowing businesses to elastically and quickly scale their usage up or down when needed. The new service also allows customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS itself, eliminating 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," Amazon said. "Data uploaded to Amazon Glacier remains safely stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers."

On the security front, data sent to Amazon Glacier is transferred via Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys. Access to data can also be controlled using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) which enables organizations with multiple employees to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account, and to set resource-based access policies.

As for pricing, AWS said Amazon Glacier is a low-cost, pay-as-you-go service costing as little as $0.01 per GB per month. Based in the N. Virginia region, data transfer IN costs nothing, and the first 1 GB transferred OUT per month costs nothing as well. However up to 10 TB per month is $0.120 per GB, then the next 40 TB that month is $0.090 per GB. For the full pricing chart, head here.

Amazon Glacier is now available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) Regions. For more information, visit http://aws.amazon.com/glacier.

Kevin Parrish is a contributing editor and writer for Tom's Hardware,Tom's Games and Tom's Guide. He's also a graphic artist, CAD operator and network administrator.

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