Amazon released a new product in their web services line of data storage apps on Tuesday. Amazon Glacier is a cloud based tape backup replacement solution aimed at enterprise level storage needs. Glacier aims to compete with in-house storage systems on data redundancy and price. The entry level cost of Glacier is $0.01 per gigabyte per month. Media archival, research and scientific data storage and business information, as well as magnetic tape replacement, are ideal use cases for Glacier, according to Amazon.
Amazon Glacier is an enterprise cloud based tape backup replacement solution.
Amazon first broke into the cloud computing marketplace back in 2002 with Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services saw a steady growth of success until 2011 when it suffered a major service outage and once again last July when a severe storm damaged datacenters in Northern Virginia. With the recent outages still in everyone’s mind Amazon has a sizeable task ahead of them to convince businesses that the service is resilient and reliable enough to store their most important data. Additional concerns are raised from the services restrictive access constraints. Glacier is intended as a long term storage solution and data stored in the system can take as long as five hours to access. Combine that with a data access fee if a business needs to retrieve more than 5% of the data stored in the system within a single month and you realize that Glacier has some considerable drawbacks.
Whether or not Glacier is right for your business will depend on your individual needs, regardless, Amazon has produced a product that will gain great attention in the coming months. With more and more businesses headed to cloud storage and cloud based applications it looks like Amazon is holding strong as one of the top service providers for the future.
– Richard Keene
IT Computer Support of New York
Design and Optimization Department
