Amazon Web Services rolls out Glacier: for the data you seldom need

Amazon’s Web Services division today announced the launch of Glacier, a new archiving and data storage product.

The tech giant says that the service is designed especially for data “that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable”.

It also claims that its price offering of as US$0.01 per gigabyte per month makes it much more cost-effective than hosting the data on your own premises. Glacier apparently addresses the fact that “Companies typically over-pay for data archiving”:

First, they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth.

Amazon reckons that Glacier is perfect for preserving “valuable but aging digital content” such as “websites, software source code, video games, user-generated content and other digital artifacts that are no longer readily available”. If you’re worried about trusting all your data to a bunch of servers, it also says that Glacier “is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive”.

The company’s rate card suggests that Glacier won’t cost any money to join and upload to the service and that people won’t have to pay until they want to get data out. The service will be available across the US, the Asia-Pacific regions and Europe.