Amazon Glacier, Archive Storage Solution by AWS

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced Amazon Glacier – a secure, reliable and low cost storage solution designed for data archiving and backup.

It is designed for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference. Examples include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. With Glacier, customers can store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month, a savings compared to on-premises solutions.

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. This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money.

With Glacier, there are no upfront capital commitments, all ongoing operational expenses are included, and businesses can elastically and quickly scale their usage up or down when needed.

Complete Genomics provides human genome sequencing and analysis as a service to academic and biopharmaceutical researchers. "Every day our genome sequencers produce terabytes of data," said Keith Raffel, Complete’s SVP and chief commercial officer. "As our company moves into the clinical space, we face a legal requirement to archive patient data for years that would drastically raise the cost of storage. Thanks to Amazon Glacier’s secure and scalable solution, we will be able to provide cost-effective, long-term storage and thereby eliminate a barrier to providing whole genome sequencing for medical treatment of cancer and other genetic diseases."

Glacier allows customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, removing the need for hardware provisioning, data replication across multiple facilities, or hardware failure detection and repair. Designed to deliver average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored, the service automatically replicates all data across multiple facilities and performs ongoing data integrity checks, using redundant data to perform automatic repairs if hardware failure or data corruption is discovered. Data uploaded to Glacier remains stored for as long as it is needed with no additional effort from customers.

New York Public Radio is home to public radio stations WNYC and WQXR, and is a producer of original content for public radio in America. "An organization like ours thinks in centuries when it comes to content retention, and long term preservation of our Master Archives is a critical part our mission here at NYPR," said Steve Shultis, CTO, New York Public Radio. "Storing these core assets on traditional media such as local disk and off-site tape exposes us to corruption and even outright-loss of data. We are excited to move our archives to Amazon Glacier, which will be a better long-term solution."

"Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution," said Alyssa Henry, VP of AWS Storage Services. "This approach requires expensive upfront payments, is difficult to operate and maintain, and leads to wasted capacity and money. Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well."

Amazon Glacier is available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and EU-West (Ireland) regions.

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