Amazon Glacier

The online retailer Amazon announced in August, 2012 the beginning of work of the new Amazon Glacier project. Service provides services in long-term data storage and is expected first of all the enterprises of small and medium business. It is supposed that using Glacier of the enterprise various data, documents and files to which continuous access is not necessary will be able to store.

The stated cost of storage of 1 GB of data with the help of a cloud service of Glacier will be only 1 cent a month. At the same time in Amazon guarantee that annual average reliability of data storage will be 99.999999999% what any of the existing backup systems will not be able to provide. Thus, if in storage 100 billion objects are downloaded, then can be only one of them lost.

The restriction on volume stored is not provided. Amazon will use inexpensive hard drives, but time of data access will be quite considerable — from 3 to 5 hours. Besides, monthly clients of Amazon Glacier will be able to receive in case of need only 5% of the data, and for downloading of files with a capacity over 1 GB it is necessary to pay additional 0.12 cents for 1 GB. At withdrawal of data during shorter in comparison with stipulated term (not earlier than three months) the payment in the amount of 0.03 cents for 1 GB is also provided.

As for additional benefits of Glacier, it is possible to refer to them that it does not require a subscription fee — calculation goes only for the volume of storage which is really used in this or that time. The companies should not plan wastes for service in advance and 'to be insured', selecting just in case more capacious rates which can not be useful. As rates for uses of storage are rather moderate, the enterprises can save on the needs for backups using magnetic or optical mediums.

Loading, extraction of archives and monitoring of the status are possible through Amazon Glacier API. All files are automatically ciphered by AES 256 and duplicated in different data centers before API return reply to the request of the client. The commercial status of service means a number of contractual commitments which are undertaken by provider.

Thus, the new cloud will be ideal for the purposes of archiving of data, but it will be hardly convenient for storage of operational information. Future Glacier promises to integrate about Amazon S3 hosting platform. It will be made in order that clients could archive web contents of the websites quickly.

But it is not enough to offer the affordable prices of file allocation in the cloud storage, Amazon also should convince business of its fault tolerance and security. It is well-known that even the most insignificant loss of information can cause irreparable damage for work of the enterprises.

Amazon Glacier is available in the USA (through data centers in Virginia, California and Oregon), Europe (data center in Ireland) and the countries of the Pacific Rim.