Amazon.com recently announced a cloud storage solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS), further expanding its cloud offerings. It is interesting to note that as an archival service, the pricing model discourage frequent access with surcharge on frequency and bandwidth.
This new service is named Amazon Glacier and is a low-cost solution for data archiving, backups and other long-term storage projects where data is not accessed frequently but needs to be retained for future reference.
The cost of the service starts from one cent per gigabyte per month, with upload and retrieval requests costing five cents per thousand requests and outbound data transfer (i.e. moving data from one AWS region to another) costing 12 cents per gigabyte.
Companies usually incur significant costs for data archiving. They initially make an expensive upfront payment, after which they end up purchasing additional storage space in anticipation of growing backup demand, leading to under-utilized capacity and wasted money. With Amazon Glacier, companies will be able to keep costs in line with actual usage, allowing managers to know the exact costs of their storage systems at all times.
Cloud storage came into prominence in 2009, with Nirvanix and Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) being two of the major pioneers. Since then, Amazon has continued to dominate the space, with other players like Rackspace (RAX) and Microsoft (MSFT) offering their own solutions.
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