Is tape storage getting you down? Are you perhaps tired of maintaining that costly hard-disk array or simply, you've no more space for storage? Well fret not as Amazon believes it has the answer for you and that answer is up in the cloud, though at the same time, it's a glacier, Amazon Glacier to be exact.
Glacier is the latest web-service to be offered by the firm, which has witnessed massive success with its S3 simple storage service. Glacier is designed to come in at a much lower price-point for those who simply wish to archive data and, whilst retrieval is possible, requests typically head into a queue and can take three to five hours to process, making the solution unideal for live business-critical operations, yet perfect for business-critical archiving and long-term storage.
Users of the service will be charged per gigabyte, per month, which for the UK works out at the grand old fee of 0.7p. Offering up an example, this means that it would cost £8.40 to maintain a 100GB archive over a one-year period. There's no provisioning issues with this service either, users can grow or shrink their storage on-demand, with an individual storage limitation of 40TB. Amazon also goes on to quote annual data durability of 99.999999999 per cent, as data is stored in multiple sites and on multiple devices within each site.
Interested? Then take a closer look.
