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Amazon is digging deeper into the enterprise with a data back-up and archival service designed to help kill off tape.
The cloud provider has just launched Glacier, which it says takes the headache out of digital archiving and delivers “extremely low” cost storage.
Glacier has been built on the Amazon storage, management and security infrastructure and is being offered as a low-cost cloudy alternative to building or paying for expensive services using traditional storage technologies – particularly tape.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels blogged here about the new product, arguing that archival is a major challenge for most as it means picking the “right” technology and then investing in either building new, off-site facilities or paying a service supplier.
“It requires substantial upfront capital investments in cold data storage systems such as tape robots and tape libraries, then there’s the expensive support contracts and don’t forget the ongoing operational expenditures such as rent and power,” Vogels blogged.
In Glacier's FAQ here, Amazon labours the point that while tape can seem like a cheap – ahem, “cost effective” – option, the costs can mount in the long term as it takes up more storage space and the media needs careful management.
Enter Amazon, with its disk and server-based system and pay-as-you-go consumption. Glacier starts at $0.01 per gigabyte for a month, with further charges for data requests and transfers. Amazon says customers get 5 per cent of retrievals free each month.
The new product builds not just on Amazon’s S3 for cloud storage system, but also the AWS Storage Gateway that connects on-premise SANs and ports their contents to S3. Storage Gateway was launched by Amazon in January this year.
Glacier introduces an API that lets you create archives on S3, in which you build data vaults. The API also allows you to upload and download data and monitor your service, and includes the ability to create alerts. Access to the service is via AWS Identity Management and the AWS Access Management Service, with SSL and 256-bit encryption. Amazon reckons it will take three to five hours to complete data transfer.
The system targets large organisations tasked with regulatory compliance, and media and entertainment companies with large amounts of digital storage.
Amazon said that in "coming months" it will allow customers to "seamlessly" move data between S3 and Glacier based on data lifecycle policies. ®
COMMENTS
Re: It's cheap as chips
Well, it's sort of cheap.
I've just had a good look around their site (and the AWS blog) and have found out a few things.
First, the data is stored redundantly (specifically can cope with failure of two stores simultaneously), and you can choose if you want it in the US, EU (Ireland, 10% more expensive) or APEC (Singapore, 12% more than the US).
You store data in 'archives'. Once you have uploaded an archive, you cannot change it (though you can add to it and delete the whole thing), you are charged for three months of storage as a minimum, and if you want to download it, you have to get the whole thing. So make sure you split your data up - each archive needs to be a file!
After requesting an 'archive' for download, you have to wait 3-5 hours before you can start to download it. You then have 24 hours to get it.
You need to know what you have stored. A list of the description (if you provide one), creation date and size of each archive is available, but is only updated once per day; if you need any more info you have to download the thing.
You can only download 5% of your stored data per month *pro rated daily* for free. After that, prices go up very fast! As an example, if you stored 1TB of data, and wanted to get the whole thing you would be charged about $369.80 (excluding taxes). (again, 10% more for EU, 12% more for APEC).
So, only good for archiving if you are pretty sure you're not going to want to get most of it back.
Working for the download charge:
Peak hourly retrieval for the month = 36 gigabyte per hour (80Mbps)
Billable peak hourly retrieval = Peak hourly retrieval (36) - Free retrieval hourly allowance (1.7GB) = 34.29
Retrieval fee = Billable peak hourly retrieval (34.29) x Hours in the month (720) x retrieval price ($0.01) = $246.92
Then you add the data download fee at $0.120 per GB. So 1024* 0.12 = $122.88. 122.88+246.92 = $369.8
Re: It's cheap as chips
either way, you're not going to get it back within 2 hours as you would with a tape drive (uncompressed)
Re: Very slow retrieval
Wouldn't be surprised if the disks are online alreayd, and the multi-hour retrieval is artificially added to stop people dumping the much-more-expensive S3...
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