At its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas, Amazon’s AWS today announced a new storage service that is meant for deep archival data that is only needed very infrequently but can’t be deleted. That makes Glacier Deep Archive an extension to the existing AWS Glacier service, but at a far lower price. Indeed, at $0.00099 per gigabyte and month, it’s pretty much the cheapest way to store data in the cloud. That’s a $1 per terabyte per month for archival storage.
The new service will go online in 2019.
AWS promises 99.99999999999 percent durability for the data. The company hasn’t yet said how long it will take to get access to this archival data yet, though. Traditionally, you’d have to wait hours to retrieve data. Chances are, that’s the same with this new service.
As AWS’ CEO Andy Jassy noted during his keynote, this service is mostly meant to replace the good old-fashioned tape that many companies still rely on. “We have a lot of customers with gobs of data,” Jassy said. “And these are pieces of data that are even less frequently than what people access on Glacier. Today, the way people manage this, they’re managing with tape. […] If you ever had the joy of managing tape, it’s no picnic.”
Jassy also noted that if a company ever wanted to move that data off premises, it’s not only hard but that data will likely be far away from your analytics and machine learning services. “You have to be out of your mind to manage your own tape moving forward,” said Jassy.
