There has been no shortage of cloud storage services in the market recently. Ever since the popularity of Dropbox, nearly everyone wants a piece of the pie. Nearly everything is moving to the cloud, and a lot of companies are starting to get their own cloud storage solutions, or invest on 3rd party solutions.
Amazon seeks to join this battle for supremacy in the cloud storage space by introducing Glacier, another cloud storage solution that Amazon has come up with for heavy, long term data storage needs like backups. According to the announcement, the Amazon Glacier is optimized for data archiving and backup. These are files you like to keep somewhere, but you don’t expect to access them regularly.
While these services are welcome for consumers, Amazon tends to hint how these services would be a huge boon for corporations looking to keep their company’s data in a reliable cloud storage system.
It is marketed as an “extremely low” cloud storage solution, probably where the extremely low temperature ‘Glacier’ nam
e came from. Amazon argues that while ‘tape’ backup storage solutions may come cheaper upfront, it is more expensive in the long run, compared to Amazon’s Glacier, which is a cloud and disk storage solution that will start at only $0.01 per gigabyte, per month.
The service is a Pay as you go solution, where you don’t have to spend more than what you need and when you need it. There would of course be charges for retrieval of information and transfers, but Amazon promises that 5% of their data retrievals will be free each month.
This cloud storage service is not like other cloud storage systems that are focused on keeping the data so you can access it anytime, anywhere with data coverage. For that purpose, you can check out Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, which is slightly more expensive at around $0.125 and $0.055 per gigabyte per month, depending on the amount of data you store. Glacier is meant to be a storage locker for information you want to keep, but you don’t expect to retrieve frequently. It is expected that people will use S3 and Glacier hand in hand for their cloud storage purposes.
Amazon is slowly growing as a company built on the cloud. It may not be long when Amazon will share the same status as Google as an online giant in web based services.
Image sources: digitaltrends.com, amazopia.com
