Amazon Web Services Announces Glacier

Need to backup your valuable data or a company’ s project to the cloud? Now you have another site to consider.

Amazon’s web services, like their S3 cloud services, has proven a valuable service with many large online enterprises depending on Amazon to serve up its contents. Now they have another service similar to their S3 service, called Glacier. Amazon’s Glacier is described as a “secure, reliable and extremely low-cost storage solution” aimed at data archiving and backup. For around a penny per month per gigabyte, customers can back up their documents and projects on Amazon’s web services. According to Amazon, Glacier “will store your data with high durability” as there are “plenty of redundancy and Glacier can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.”

Though Glacier sounds similar to Amazon’s S3, the services has some differences. While Amazon’s S3 is optimized for rapid retrieval, Amazon’s Glacier is not designed for rapid retrieval as it will take 3 to 5 hours before it is available to be downloaded; so it is not an inexpensive way of hosting your website.

There is no limit on the amount of data you can store on Amazon’s Glacier, though each individual archive has a 40 TB limits (which should be more than enough for most people, but not those gene findings). It will cost at least one cent per gigabyte per month to store your data on Amazon’s server (depending on the location you want to store), there are additional cost for requests and data transfer. Be sure to check Amazon Glacier’s pricing list to learn more about the pricing.