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Looking for long-term storage for your data? Amazon Glacier might be what you need.
Amazon Glacier, a new data/cloud storage service by Amazon (duh), allows users to storage huge amounts of data at extremely low rates: $0.01 per GB per month if storing in Amazon’s North Virgina or Oregon data centers, $0.011 per GB per month if storing in Amazon’s Northern California or Ireland data centers, and $0.012 per GB per month if storing in Amazon’s Tokyo data center. The intention of Amazon Glacier is to provide reliable, long-term data storage and as such Amazon promises 99.999999999% annual reliability. Or, as ArsTechnica points out, if you store 1TB of data with Amazon Glacier, you can expect to lose only 10 bytes per year.
There is no limit to how much data you can store with Amazon Glacier (you just pay more as you store more data) but each individual file is limited to 40TB in size.
The catch to Amazon Glacier is Amazon will charge you for retrieving your data ($0.01 per GB if you attempt to retrieve more than 5% of your data per month) and retrieving data is slow — it can take between 3-5 hours per data retrieval request. Furthermore, while transferring data into Amazon Glacier is free (unless you physically ship data drives to Amazon, which will cost you), you will be charged for transferring data out. Costs for transferring data out start at $0.120 per GB after the initial 1 GB and decrease as you transfer more data, and the costs vary depending on region.
The use case for Amazon Glacier is obviously long-term, reliable storage of data that does not need to be accessed often. While this type of service is tailored for giant corporations who want to offset costs of long-term data storage, Amazon Glacier can also be used by small businesses and individual citizens to serve as a secure storage mechanism in case of a major disaster which destroys other forms of backups.
Amazon doesn’t specify exactly what security measures it uses to protect data stored with Amazon Glacier but it does mention it will be able to meet the “regulatory and business requirements” of enterprises, presumably indicating AES 256-bit encryption is used to protect data.
Hit up the link below to get started with Amazon Glacier.
[via ArsTechnica | Image via Jason Bache]
